“I can’t hear you,” says Irene. “Speak up.”

“Do you want me to separate the fiction from the nonfiction?” repeats Nora, her assistant.

“What?”

Irene has remarkably sharp hearing, but Nora’s voice doesn’t carry—she doesn’t carry it.

“I asked if you want me to separate the fiction from the nonfiction.”

“No,” replies Irene. “Of course not. You are so young, for someone so somber.”

Nora is eighteen, Irene is eighty, and the difference of their ages is what hems their lives together. Books are heaped against the walls of the house like ploughed snow, and Nora is alphabetizing them against Irene’s will. Nora slots one spine against another, gritting her teeth.

“Anyway,” continues Irene, “what I’m trying to say is that marriage is like communism. Nice in theory, but have you ever seen it go well in practice?”

They’re sitting in Irene’s den with the television off. Snowmelt a week before Christmas gives Irene the blues, and if you don’t extinguish the blues right away, they’ll extinguish you, your whole world, especially your children, and pretty soon you’re wearing ghosts for clothes, tumble-drying everything to death. Irene summarized this to Nora over decaf coffee that morning. Ever since lunch, Irene has been riffing on institutional oppression to cheer herself up. It’s a good day for her.

Irene hurls her juice box at the trash. “Let’s do something fun,” she says. “Let’s go to Costco!”

Nora slides a book on dark matter of the mind into the O’s. The stack in her arms includes Heigel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Cosmologies of Capitalism, Introduction to Epistemology, and one book titled DEATH in enormous font. Irene took online philosophy classes throughout her fifties. Menopause has a What-the-Hell effect on you, she once said by way of explanation. She always emphasizes that the classes were free. The books now purr in Nora’s arms.

“Those classes were free,” Irene says, noticing the titles.

“What do you need?”

“Where to begin! In the first place—”

“At Costco,” clarifies Nora.

“Toilet paper,” says Irene. “Lots of it. The good thick kind, none of that tracing paper crap. And I need peanuts. Sardines. Tomato juice. Firewood.” She pauses. “A trampoline. A yellow diamond ring. One of those little sheds.”

“Let’s make a list,” says Nora.

“What?”

“Let’s make a—”

“Speak up.”

“A list. I said let’s make a list.”

Irene rolls her eyes. “You and your lists. If I don’t use my legs right now, they’ll fall clean off. I know what I need.”

In light of recent events, your most important job is to help her be happy, read the e-mail from Irene’s son a month ago.

“Okay,” concedes Nora. “No lists.” She puts down the books and crosses the room, gently strapping Irene’s swollen feet into boots. She retrieves the bedazzled cane, places it in Irene’s hand, and helps her stand.

“I like these boots, by the way,” mutters Irene. “That was nice of you.”

“Oh, good.”

Recently, Nora ordered them for Irene, charmed by the stream-of-consciousness description online: Genuine flat waterproof zip skidfree grip mature round toe short soft faux leather faux fur winter mother! Nora felt she knew the seller. His instinct to invoke mothers. Before these, Irene owned only two pairs of shoes: white wedding pumps and ailing clogs.

Nora helps Irene into her camouflage coat and tries to zip it, but Irene swats her hand away. “Feel like I’m suffocating when I’m sealed in like that.” Irene refuses to leave the house without the trapper hat—a Frankenstein of lambskin and raccoon fur that once belonged to the spy who took her virginity, or the hunter who lived next door, or her little brother, depending on the day. You remember, the one who trained police dogs.

“Spring in December!” Irene cries as Nora locks the door. It is unseasonably warm, and Nora feels her entire body sigh in the light. Irene’s house is about the size and shape of a two-car garage, vinyl siding yellowed like coffee-teeth. “Glad to be dead before the eschaton. Your generation better learn to swim. But you smell this mud? Delicious!”

Nora eases Irene into the maroon station wagon she shares with her mother.

“Still driving this deathtrap, I see,” Irene grumbles. “Let’s listen to something alive. You’ve got to listen to something alive, otherwise it’s just you and your death, separated by millions of miles of indoor track. Do you know what I mean?”

Irene spends the whole ride fretting from station to station. Nora knows exactly what she means.

◆

“Welcome to Costco Wholesale,” grins a man in a red vest, his face plump and kind and dappled in acne.

“It’s a dystopia of late-capitalism,” declares Irene fondly. “Or is that redundant?”

Nora takes a cart and offers the man a nonverbal apology.

“Oh look!” Irene cackles. “Just what we need.” She points to a three-gallon jug of massage oil, which stands defiantly among the flatscreens. There are few items in the warehouse light enough for Irene to hold, and she appreciates them as one appreciates the treasures of a museum. “There’s nothing more patriotic than buying in bulk,” she beams. “Come on—let’s go to Emergency Kits and Supplies.”

This is Irene’s favorite aisle, and she’s already swaggering toward it. Nora knew this would happen. She follows, always surprised by Irene’s speed despite the hip surgery and the cane. Nora darts furtive glances about the store, afraid of running into someone she once knew. The question is what she fears most: I thought you were away at college?

A gap year, she would say.

Nora checks her phone, eager to finish the shopping as soon as possible: it’s about 3:00, and if Irene doesn’t nap by 4:00, the fundamental laws of her world are prone to mutation and she may plummet into apocalypse. Then again, reasons Nora, denying her the pleasure of the Emergency Aisle can generate a similar effect. Once they reach Irene’s destination—a display of First-Aid Kits and safes—Nora removes a scrap of paper from her pocket.

“What if I found—”

“When in God’s name did you have time to make a list?”

“I just—”

“I should’ve known.”

“I jotted a couple things down yesterday.”

“You think a hundred and sixteen servings of beet juice would get us through Armageddon?” asks Irene.

“What if I found the essential stuff while you stayed here? I’ll be quick.”

Irene turns her attention to a twenty-three-pound bucket of macaroni and cheese, her head titled, her eyes squinted in reverie, as though admiring the David.

“I can meet you back here in fifteen minutes,” says Nora.

“The nanny. Fine.”

“Don’t leave this aisle, okay?”

“The dog-sitter. Alright.”

“Keep your phone—”

“Al-right.”

Nora studies Irene, all ninety-six pounds of her, her head lost in the trapper hat. Irene traces a pack of batteries with a liver-spotted hand.

◆

The night before, Nora couldn’t sleep, distracted by distant howls of freight trains. Growing up on the border of Michigan and Indiana—landlocked, cornlocked, entombed by churches and liquor stores and tanning beds—Nora once found these sounds enchanting. She’d fantasize about wading barefoot through the snow and leaping out of this life, into another.

But something changed between then and now. Now she finds the train calls spooky, threatening. Now they remind her of the coyotes she encountered on the farmhouse porch one morning, hot rabbits between their teeth.

In the local paper, Nora read that the town implemented a Quiet Zone in autumn, outlawing the train horns. But it’s December and still the horns sound, prompting a federal investigation. Their mayor wrote the manager of the Railroad Administration’s office in Chicago, attaching a list of thirteen times city staff members reported hearing the trains. This is the Rust Belt; people are inured to neglect and know their complaints must be precise. The letter described the cadence: long, long, short, long. It keeps residents up at night, the mayor wrote.

Nora envies their breakable peace.

◆

“Girls like you all over the Midwest. Boring and nice, nice and boring,” spits Irene as Nora draws the curtains, back at the house. “And what a joke—you wasted your ticket out.” The bedroom is cold, so Nora floats a second quilt over Irene’s body. “Let me tell you something. You’d be better off as a fascinating bitch. That’s really why you failed at Chicago, you know.” Irene closes her eyes. “Because you were so boring and nice.”

Nora leaves the door open as she exits the room. Paces to the back—a frigid indoor porch—and sits on a lawn chair. This room is cluttered, inexplicably, with flotation devices and taxidermy. Life jackets, throw rings, pool noodles, giant inflatable fruit, floaties for children with cartoon whales printed on the arms. Lake Michigan is the closest body of water—a significant drive—and Irene hasn’t been there in decades. Carelessly tossed among the flotation devices are six poorly-preserved animals: a red fox, a largemouth bass, a ringneck pheasant, a mountain goat, and a chipmunk in a tiny canoe. Irene said she inherited them from her little brother—the one who trained police dogs. Nora shivers and decides her next task will be to reckon with these objects. She leaves the room and composes a text.

Hi David. Just letting you know your mom had another episode today. Don’t worry—it’s not as bad as last time. She’s okay now.

He begins typing right away. What happened?

Nora considers what to reveal and what to keep to herself. She recalls the young man in the parking lot, his wrong bemusement as he informed Nora that “the old lady” was trying to get a ride to the zoo. She said she had been sent by the government to release the herbivores.

We got separated at Costco earlier, Nora types. Eventually I found her near the Juday Creek Golf Course.

Jesus, David replies. Was she OK?

She was lost and scared. But we got back home without too much trouble. Now she’s taking a nap.

Minutes pass and nothing.

Nora enters the kitchen to slice the grapefruit she brought, then remembers that all the sharp knives were removed before her time. Along with the car, the rope, the alcohol, the bleach. David had paid to replace the gas stove with an electric one. All the medicine now huddles in a cabinet, to be unlocked and dispensed by Nora alone.

Thank God she’s so anti-firearm, David had said during the interview. It could’ve been much worse. We thought about getting her a gun a while back, after we heard about some armed robberies in the neighborhood. But we might as well have offered her a hydrogen bomb, the way she took it.

In the sunny kitchen, Nora slaps her face and swallows tears. She lets the pain surge and fade, then puts the groceries away and moves to the den, alphabetizing books in silence. Irene has refused a Christmas tree—even a miniature one—citing her well-documented disgust with consumerism and Christianity’s oppressive ubiquity, but Nora suspects there are other reasons.

At 6:03, a text defibrillates Nora’s phone. She jumps.

Can you come outside?

Pulse quickened, she slips on her shoes and pushes the screen door. The sky has powered down. In the street, David leans against a nice car in a nice coat, smoking a cigarette. Nora crosses the lawn.

“She still sleeping?” he whispers unnecessarily.

“Yes.”

“I don’t want to come inside. I just thought I’d stop by on my way home from work and—check in with you.”

David, Irene’s oldest, works in construction. Nora doesn’t know much else about him. He studies her for a moment in the streetlight, paying her the same sexual reverence he paid her at the beginning of their interview last month, as if it were a toll she had to collect before they could proceed. The same look that men have deposited onto her body since before she knew what it meant. Now, looks like this from men like David taste like vodka, make her want to sprint into traffic. She sees antlers. She blushes.

David takes a drag. “You shouldn’t have let her out of your sight like that.”

Nora winces. “I know. It was poor judgment.”

“I’m not angry, but you should’ve known better.”

“I know.”

“I looked it up. That golf course is a mile and a half away from Costco.”

“I’m sorry.” Nora bites another round of tears. “She was having a good day, and she’s never wandered off like that before, and—”

“Like I said, not angry. Just don’t let it happen again.”

A dog barks in a nearby yard. Nora wants to speak, but can’t; speech will break the dam.

“I know what you think of me,” David says after a beat. “Twenty-minute drive and no visits.”

Nora twitches.

“Has she told you how long it’s been?” asks David. “Since I last visited?”

Irene hasn’t. She rarely speaks of her children by name.

“Three years. A few phone calls, sure. And I pay for repairs, have some guys come and fix things, drop off groceries. But no visits.”

David wants Nora to react, wants her face to reflect his guilt so that he can look it in the eye. She complies. She always complies.

“She thinks I’m racist just because of who I voted for,” says David.

Nora doesn’t know what her face is doing but her expression must anger him, because he adjusts his voice and posture—crouched, low, familiar. Irene’s.

“Look.” There’s a dot of mustard on his collar. “My mother can be a real thrill, but you have no idea what it was like to grow up with her. All this—” he gestures to the house and Nora translates: the mood swings, the mania, the depression, the insomnia, the obsessions, the cruelty, the unpredictability, all this— “it’s not just the dementia, you know. We were all stuck in the crossfire growing up, and it was way worse back then. We didn’t have the word for it and she didn’t have the treatment. We all have our scars. I mean, Tom and Caroline won’t even call. They don’t want updates, they don’t want to pitch in for things. I have to convince them.” He drops the cigarette, half-smoked, and crushes it beneath his heel.

Nora swallows. In this neighborhood, the American flag sprouts like a native plant. She squints at a trio of them across the street.

“She thinks she’s a genius, you know,” David continues, indifferent to Nora’s silence, or maybe encouraged by it. “But even if she is, she’s not a very useful one, is she? Dropped out of high school—did she tell you that? Yeah. So it’s not like she was qualified for much to begin with, but after our dad left she kept getting fired and fired from everything, wouldn’t say why. I had to work two jobs just to keep the heat on, buy milk. She’d love you one minute and hate you the next, totally wreck the house after I spent all day cleaning it—it was like living with a feral animal. She’d sleep for days, stay up for days. I mean, Jesus, I remember pouring the liquor down the drain before school.” He pauses, wipes his balding head. “And listen, I’m a grown man, I’ve got perspective now. I know she couldn’t help it. But that doesn’t—that doesn’t make it easy.”

Nora plays the mirror.

“We pay for her bills, you know. Even now. My wife and me. We pay for everything.” David scans Nora again, searching for proof that he’s bad, that he’s good. After a moment he sighs and retrieves his keys from his pocket. “Enough. I didn’t come here to unload this on you.”

Nora shakes her head. She wonders when she lost the desire to say the right thing. These days, she can’t even pick it out in a crowd.

“Anyway,” says David, getting in his car. “I have to get back. Cable guy’s coming. He’s chatty. Keeps telling my wife about the gift of tongues.”

David turns the key and stares at the wheel.

At a loss, Nora approaches his window and takes a deep breath. “You’re doing the best you can,” she says experimentally. The line tastes like someone else’s in her mouth.

“Don’t say that,” he grimaces. “If you’re right, that just makes it worse.”

He drives off.

◆

“It’s the longest night of the year and I can’t even drink,” says Irene. “I wish you’d lighten up, Nora. Are you even a real teenager?”

Nora prods the fire and stows the lighter in her purse, faking a laugh.

Episodes usually drain from Irene like dreams after they occur, and today’s was no exception. She woke from her nap with no apparent recollection of the afternoon and launched into a full-speed condemnation of the livestock industry, YouTube’s algorithm for amplified content, the George C. Marshall Institute—a condemnation that accelerated as Nora prepared vegetable stew and didn’t brake until the fruit salad was gone.

“This is not the United States of Ameritocracy,” Irene says, as she often says. “United States of Dominance. Machismo. Winning. We never stopped colonizing, you know, and that’s our national disease. That’s what’ll kill us all, in the end.” This is a well-worn speech, and she recites it the way Nora recites her old monologues from high school plays when she’s home alone. Gum that’s lost its flavor.

In content, the conversations Nora has with Irene are nearly identical to the ones she used to have with her college roommates, but the tone is different. Despite their zeal, the roommates treated topics like income inequality, public discourse on mental illness, and corporate corruption as purely theoretical. To Irene, nothing is purely theoretical.

After dinner, Irene sips her lavender tea in the wood-paneled den. She wears some kind of fleece cloak over her pajamas, hood up. The effect is alarming.

“Read from the Book of Revelation,” Irene says. “It soothes me.”

Nora glances at the only clock Irene owns, which is encased in glass on the mantel. It’s after ten and she should have put Irene to bed by now, should have put herself to bed by now, but the late nap mangled the schedule and Irene has refused to sleep.

“Did you know,” begins Irene, “that checking the time is the leading cause of death in America?”

“Revelation? You’re serious?”

“Serious as a rogue comet. Serious as the Yellowstone Caldera. Serious as Larsen B in the summer of 2002. Serious—”

“Okay, okay.” Nora retrieves a bible from a stack beside the firewood and locates Revelation. “You want epistolary? Apocalyptic? Prophetic?”

“Read to me about the Whore of Babylon. She’s a kick.”

“Which chapters?”

“Seventeen and eighteen. Read with feeling.”

Nora flutters through the pages, which are as thin as rice-paper, and inhales. “‘And there came one of the seven angels which had the seven vials, and talked with me, saying unto me, Come hither; I will shew unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters….’”

Irene mouths the words. “With feeling.”

The Whore of Babylon was a kick. She wore purple and scarlet garments, gold and jewels and pearls, rode a matching beast with seven heads and ten horns, got drunk on the blood of the holy. “‘And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH. And I saw—’”

“You never told me why you dropped out.”

Nora falters. “What?”

“Of college.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean,” Irene says slowly, deliberately. “Why did you leave?”

“College?”

Irene narrows her eyes. “College.”

“Just wasn’t for me,” says Nora, submerged in sudden heat.

“Bullshit. Nobody drops out of a school like that, nobody walks away from a full ride without a reason. Nobody like you, at least.” Irene pauses, assessing Nora in the firelight. “Something happened.”

Nora shakes her head. Her skin feels too tightly sewn to her body, like clothing she’s outgrown. “Nothing happened.”

“That’s a lie. You’re jumpy as an opossum in the daylight.”

“I’ve always been jumpy.”

“What was it?” demands Irene. “What happened to you in Chicago?”

Nora shuts the Bible forcefully. “I just wasn’t as smart as I thought I was, okay? I overestimated myself. I failed out. I don’t like to talk about it.”

“You weren’t there long enough to fail out.”

“I got past the point of no return with my grades and I could read the writing on the wall.”

Irene purses her lips. “You want me to guess what happened?”

At this, nausea heaves in Nora’s stomach and adrenaline rattles her. “This is ridiculous.” She stands up. “It’s late and you should sleep.”

“You’re not my mother.”

“You’re right,” Nora snaps. “Your son pays me to be your daughter because your real one can’t stand you.”

Irene recoils. Nora has never seen her look wounded, before, and the shock of it makes her breath catch in her throat. “Look,” Nora says. Finally, her tears break. “I’m sorry. I’m exhausted and I need to get home. I’m sorry.”

The moment of injury passes, and Irene rebuilds herself in the chair, under her cloak; her posture sharpens and her words fall jagged. “You’re no saint,” she says. “You think you are because you grin and bear it, grin and bear it. But that doesn’t make you holy. You know what makes you holy?”

Nora grinds her teeth. “What.”

“Screaming,” Irene jeers. “All the saints I know scream.”

And of course, Irene screams in demonstration, screams to punish Nora for her silence, her meekness, her smallness, for failing to seize the freedoms that women like Irene unlocked for her. Irene screams her throat raw, screams herself into a coughing fit. The sound is horrible, spitty, thin. “I’m younger than you are!” she cackles. Her eyes are wet and bright. “See?” And she screams again.

The fire snaps.

“Scream,” orders Irene, scary and fetal in her cloak. “Scream!”

Nora doesn’t.

“Scream!”

Nora doesn’t.

“Scream!”

“I’m not going to scream.”

“Yes you will!”

“I will not.”

“You have to scream!”

“I don’t have to do anything!”

“Scream!”

And Nora screams.

◆

In Nora’s imagination, good friends in primary colors ask her questions over cornbread. What did you want? Why did you go? Did you know him well?

It was her first month in Chicago, and she was studying at the university library when his name flashed on her phone. It had been years since they last spoke. She rushed to the lobby and tried to sound casual when she answered, her skin buzzing like a sunburn.

“Julian,” she said.

“I’m in the city for a few days,” he said. “My band and I are playing a show. Rumor has it you live here now?”

He asked if she wanted to grab drinks with him on Friday night. She felt important and scared and alive, as she always did when he called. Because she wanted to prove that her life was getting bigger and bigger, she said yes.

“I’ll pick you up,” he said.

“I can walk,” she said. “Or take the train.”

But he insisted. Then, Friday afternoon, he texted: Cocktail attire. Nora Googled “cocktail attire,” then borrowed her roommate’s black dress.

On Friday night, before Julian arrived, she took shots of cheap vodka with her roommates, who were not content with the world as it presented itself to them. They were armed with confidence, fathers, obscure feminist theory, and chemically balanced brains. They had no need for sleep medicine, no need to please everyone in the room, no need to sweeten their text messages with smiley faces and exclamation points and excessive deployment of modifiers like “just.” They dressed in practical shoes and did not wear makeup. Nora was taking notes.

When Julian picked her up that night, Nora was seventeen and he was forty. There were signs packed into every hour—the smoke on the street, the dead mouse on the sidewalk, the elderly man who fell on the steps. Nora paid attention, but resisted conclusions. Twelve inches, two drinks, and twenty-three years on the table between them. Plus a heap of language, manuals, revolutions, folktales, songs, laws, newspapers, religions, and blockbusters. Their inheritance—how to see each other through the mound of it. How to clear it off the table without trashing the space around them. The ending was telegraphed from the start, and that was why Nora didn’t believe it.

His wedding ring in the light, declarations of love for the wife. His symmetrical face, the musk of his leather jacket, deposits of muscle at the corners of his mouth from so many years clamping single-reed mouthpieces. Julian played piano and saxophone in a jazz band. He was impulsive and tall, his cheeks always flushed, some powerful engine installed at his core. He spoke many languages, played many instruments, had traveled in many countries and colonized countless small things. His life was expansive. She wanted to position hers beside his, in the hope that such immensity was contagious.

Now he sucked a buffalo wing over candlelight and worked her pliable shyness. He spoke of his wife in a way that inspired Nora to picture him in a megachurch. The night had quills; she drank either to soften them or to toughen herself. She stared at the dust on a far bookshelf and thought about mice—the study she had read. It was a pricey, woodsy, whiskey bar. They did not card her.

Julian beamed. “Every day I look at my wife and think: I just want more of you. I want more of you, Amber. Every day.” The wife was a choreographer. Smiling was a cerebral effort. He flagged down a waitress. “Another drink?”

“No. No thanks.”

“Not just one more?”

“Water’s good for now.”

“It’s on me.”

Nora gestured to her skull. “Headache.”

“She’ll have a whiskey ginger,” he told the waitress when she arrived, winking at Nora like a cool uncle. “And I’ll have another scotch.”

Nora sipped her water. The severely-pregnant waitress studied her. “What? Ginger beer is hydrating,” Julian said as he stood. “Be right back.” The waitress tracked him as he walked to the men’s room, then turned to Nora.

“Are you okay?” she demanded.

“Me?” Nora spun around absurdly. “I’m fine.”

“Are you sure? Because if you’re not—”

“I am.” She attempted a smile that conveyed watertight stability. Gripped a paper napkin.

“And if you don’t want to make a big deal out of it, I can just give you ginger beer. He won’t know the—”

“Oh, no, it’s okay. Really. I wanted another.”

The waitress evaluated Nora in the crashing music.

“He’s my friend,” Nora insisted, her thoughts sloshing in alcohol.

The waitress frowned at her with obvious pity. The same expression Nora received when she tried to carry too many groceries at once.

“He isn’t,” said the waitress before she walked away.

Nora pretended to text, seasick in her choppy guilt, until Julian returned to his seat.

“But come on,” he said. “Give me the low-down.”

“What?”

“On your love life.”

“Oh. There’s not much low to down,” she smiled. Then she felt dumb.

“Impossible. You break hearts when you walk into a room.” Julian took another buffalo wing. “I’m sure your campus is already littered with casualties.”

She blushed, embarrassed on both their behalves.

“At least promise me you’ll have some fun,” he said.

“Oh, no—I’m rationing my fun, saving it for my seventies,” she replied. “I call it my Retirement Fun.”

He grinned, baring a set of news anchor teeth. “You’re doing it wrong. Fun is for your twenties.”

“Well, I’m still a teenager.”

“Christ.”

“You’re what? Forty?”

“Don’t say that word out loud.”

Nora warmed to their banter, and the guilt of enjoying his attention was not powerful enough to cool the heat it kindled inside her. “Just you wait,” she said. “When I’m old, I’ll be stealing paddleboats, sneaking onto rooftops. Ordering the extra spicy ramen. Recording all these compromising holograms. And you’ll be bird-watching from some heated armchair.”

A laugh leapt from his mouth and landed in hers. “No,” he corrected. “I’ll be dead. But tell me more about these compromising holograms.”

This triggered some mental power outage, and Nora’s mind went blank.

“Eye contact! Bravo,” he smiled. “You could never manage that when you were little.”

“I want to be an actress,” she blurted.

“An actress?” he scoffed.

“I appreciate the vote of confidence.”

The waitress returned and set their drinks on the table without making eye contact.

“Oh, Nicole, you’re the best,” said Julian, touching her arm. “Could we also—”

But she was already at another table. “Poor thing,” Julian frowned. “On her feet all night in that condition.” He sighed. “Anyway, back to acting. I don’t doubt your ability, but I do doubt your stamina.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You can’t stand attention.”

“That’s not true.”

“It is true. I should know. I think you spoke a total of like three words to me when you were a kid. You were the shyest student I ever had.”

She took refuge in her drink. It was just ginger beer, no whiskey. She was reckless, infantilized, spoiled in safety. “I like attention in small doses. From a distance, you know. With a reliable expiration. As somebody else.”

“I dated actresses once upon a time,” said Julian. “Still on good terms with a few of them. Might be able to help you out, someday. If you’re serious.”

Even in the flattering light, he looked tired, bags swelling under his eyes, silver strands interrupting his dark hair. He had put on a bit of weight but carried it well. His face was more complicated, now—more grooves and potholes. It had been years since she last saw him.

He wiped his mouth self-consciously, and she blinked away.

Nora had a tendency to watch herself live from the corner of the room. She believed that when the future was forecasted too assuredly, the natural chaos of the world would rearrange things before the expected result could materialize. Her psychic refrain that night. She wondered what would happen next, as though she were reading a bad mystery novel that could still redeem itself with a twist. To identify what she wanted to happen did not occur to her. What will happen next, she wondered. Like she didn’t belong to herself.

“Yeah,” said Nora. “I might take you up on that.”

 “Good.”

Nicole returned and slapped their bill on the table. “I would say no rush, but I’m about to clock out. So rush.”

Julian offered his card before Nora could offer hers. After Nicole left, he raised the last of his drink to Nora. “We never toasted!”

She lifted her ginger beer.

“To you,” he said. “University of fucking Chicago, are you kidding me?” He clinked her glass and took a gulp. She thought of those mice from the study, wondered if they were given anesthesia before they were sewn together. She swayed on her stool, dizzy and sweating and shivering. The sincerity in his expression caught her off-guard, jellied her spine.

“You know I’ve always seen you as a little sister, right?”

She sipped and wished she still believed in God. “Really.”

He bit his lip. “I just have this impulse to protect you.”

She retrieved her phone and hid in its light. “How has it been three hours already?”

“Three hours!”

“I should get back.”

“You,” he smiled, “are delightfully difficult.”

◆

In the bar bathroom, Nora ran her hands under warm water long after they were clean. Her reflection looked drunk, loose, dissolving. Her makeup too careful, her face too shiny, the dress too borrowed, the labor she expended on her long auburn hair too obvious. She felt like she had the flu.

Julian Russo was her childhood piano teacher. Her memories of him were sparse and poorly lit: she was five years old and he was twenty-seven, cracking his knuckles and telling her to have a seat beside him on the bench. They met every week in the basement of a Methodist church, which smelled like wax. Sitting so close to his heat and grin and scent of soap made her horribly conscious of her breathing. He asked her to imitate his long fingers as they traveled up and down the scales. Some force wound her attention tight, and she studied the movements with an intensity she would try and fail to conjure for many pursuits to come.

“She’s a natural,” he smiled when her mother arrived to pick her up.

She was eight and he was thirty and their session was over. He rose to meet his honey-haired girlfriend at the door and Nora watched, ambushed by a feeling she would later identify as insignificance.

She was nine and she practiced with an obsession that frightened her mother. She excelled quickly; impressing Julian became her favorite sport. The pieces he gave her grew more and more difficult. “You have to let me know if this is too much for you, alright?” he would say. “It’s more than I would expect from students much older than you.” She never allowed his assignments to be too much.

She was ten, glowing from her recital, and he was waiting backstage with a bar of chocolate and a smile. “Excellent,” he beamed, gripping her shoulders. “Truly amazing.” Then he turned and offered chocolate to three other students, causing some internal avalanche in Nora.

She was eleven and he was sitting before her and her mother, the hands that Nora had memorized now plunged into his thick dark hair, and he told them he was moving to New York City to pursue music. He was joining a jazz band, he explained. Nora felt the tears stampeding toward her and she knew she could not stop them. She ran from the room.

“I’m sorry—she’s a very sensitive kid,” her mother said, and even then, Nora could detect disappointment in her voice. Disappointment in raising a kid too sensitive to function. “Your instruction has meant a lot to her. She loves playing the piano more than anything—I have to ask her to stop and watch television with me.” Two laughs. It occurred to Nora in shards that her mother and Julian were flirting. “And she doesn’t really have any…you know, father figure.” In the hallway Nora began to weep. She tried not to make any noise.

“Well, your daughter is very talented,” Julian replied. “Honestly, I’d be crushed if she didn’t continue to play.”

Nora was thirteen, entering another church, crashing into a strong scent of wax. Adrenaline surged through her body, and she became so dizzy she had to sit on a pew. She told her mother she was just hungry.

Violently shy, Nora felt a chronic distance between herself and those around her, as though she and society existed on opposite sides of a page, and after Julian moved, she lost her grip on something. The distance increased. She continued to play piano, shifting to the instruction of a woman with many exotic birds. But she was never prodigious again.

And then Nora was fifteen, leaning against a shopping cart at the supermarket, reading Wuthering Heights as her mother examined eggs.

“Nora?”

It couldn’t—but yes, there he was, back from the dead, standing in the chilly fluorescence, even taller than she remembered. His smile was broader, his hair messier, his scruff longer, his body stronger, his clothes darker and fitter. He looked altogether more expensive. Nora knew from social media that his band was doing well—they had recently been profiled in a famous magazine, one of their songs used in a famous television show. He was thirty-eight.

“What a surprise!” exclaimed her mother, tossing her hair. “What are you doing back here?”

He was there for the weekend, he explained, because his mother’s cells had turned on her—that’s how it put it: My mother’s cells turned on her. Nora had gained weight in the right places, learned how to use makeup, and spent the summer vigilantly maintaining a tan. She could not breathe. She gripped the shopping cart. Her vision blurred and she felt ridiculous, panic and joy attacking her like wind and rain.

“Wow Nora,” he beamed, his face radiant. “You’ve grown up. What are you reading?”

After that, Julian took a sporadic interest in her. It started with short messages on social media, sending her music, asking about her piano progress. The messages grew longer. Soon, she was spending entire afternoons crafting her responses to him, sometimes penning them in class. But she never told anyone about him, not even the two close friends she managed to secure. Some instinct told her to keep it a secret. He began to text her, then call her. The first time he rang, she could not bring herself to answer the phone, her body a blazing emotional wildfire, her pulse racing so fast she thought she might have to go to the hospital. The next time he called, she forced herself to pick up, though her teeth chattered from the nerves. She answered to prove that she was not too frightened of life to live it. Because that’s what he was, to her: life.

They began to talk for hours. He encouraged her to consider universities in New York City, sent her information on courses of study he thought she’d like, deadlines for summer programs she could never afford. “You’d love it here,” he told her. “You need to live somewhere that’s as interesting as you are.” Interesting, mature, talented, brilliant, singular, beautiful: these were the adjectives he fed to her over the phone when she said something worthwhile, as a trainer rewards a dolphin for tricks. She recognized the person he described not as the one she was, but as the one she aspired to be. Maybe he could talk that person into existence. She started to compare Julian—impulsive and charming, tall and scary, accomplished and urban—to the boys around her at high school, with their oversized clothes and flat voices and aversion to reading. So this is a man, Nora thought, realizing that he had always been her definition. She kept him phone-bound, digital, almost imaginary, emboldened by the bumpers of distance and improbability. How did other people distinguish between the terror of a crush and the terror of spoliation? His calls scared her awake.

During one of their longer conversations, he asked what she thought of the music he had sent her, and she said that she hadn’t listened yet. “Why not?” he asked, and she confessed that her mother’s computer had crashed; they could not afford to replace it. “You can’t listen on your phone?” She had a pre-paid flip phone that she was supposed to use for emergencies only.

A week later, in the mailbox, Nora found an envelope addressed to her. It contained a check from Julian for $1,000. It was the first physical evidence of their relationship—if that’s what you could call it—and it made her want to vomit. Nora burned the check in the fireplace.

Then Julian’s mother went into remission, and he went silent. She didn’t try to contact him, throwing herself into standardized tests and college applications. A few months later, Nora saw his wedding photos on Facebook. He had never mentioned a girlfriend, let alone a fiancée. But she never mentioned the boys who docked to and from her life, either.

In the bar bathroom, in Chicago, Nora reapplied lipstick, then tore a paper towel and removed it.

◆

Strapped into the passenger seat of Julian’s rental car, Nora held her head. Beleaguered by exams and papers, she had not slept much that week, and she was aching for her bed but her eyes strained open like there was something essential to see. He assured her he could barely feel the scotch but she saw him stumble over the mat as they exited. Crash us, I dare you.

“What are you thinking about?” he asked.

She hated this question. “I was thinking about these mice.”

“Mice, huh? Good friends of yours?”

“I recently read this study about these…mice.”

He smiled. “Riveting.”

She explained. A team of scientists had cinched the legs of a young mouse to the legs of an old mouse, uniting the vasculatures of the rodents. It was a process called parabiosis. When the young mouse joined the old mouse’s circulatory system, the young mouse’s blood benefited the old mouse. The old mouse became healthier, smarter, stronger—the young blood helped repair tissue damage. His fur became shinier.

“Bullshit,” said Julian.

“You can look it up.”

“Just from sewing their legs together?”

“From their shared blood supply. I don’t know. Something like that.”

“Wow. So people are excited about this, I imagine.”

“Well, the scientists are skeptical, but some people are saying that it could revolutionize modern medicine, extend our lifespans, one step closer to immortality, all that. If they can figure out how to apply it to humans. Which is a big if.”

“Well, there’s enough incentive, so I’m sure the money’s there. Immortality!” He paused. “But what happens to the young mouse?”

“What?”

“I mean, does the young mouse get sick or anything? Lose its… shininess?”

Nora thought. “They didn’t say what happened to the young mouse.”

 “Seems important,” he said. “Poor little guy.”

Nora scurried to another fact to distract them from this omission, its consequences and application to the transaction at hand. “There’s also a species of jellyfish that’s essentially immortal.”

“Now you’re just showing off.”

She blushed. She was showing off. “Scientists call it the ‘immortal jellyfish.’ It uses this process called transdifferentiation to revert back to a polyp when it feels threatened.”

“Polyp?”

“Like a pre-jellyfish. And the polyp is genetically identical to the adult.”

“How many times can they do that?”

“They don’t know. They think indefinitely.”

“So this thing can’t die at all?”

“Well, it can still get eaten or injured or whatever. But if it reacts in time, it can save itself. Scientists are studying that cellular mechanism, too, trying to figure out if it can be applied to humans. Same as parabiosis.”

“You, my friend, are a nerd.”

She smiled. “Don’t even get me started on hydra.”

“Imagine if we sewed healthy teens to our dying parents,” said Julian. “Or if you turned into a baby when someone held a gun to your head.” He pulled into a parking spot and broke abruptly. “Want to continue this conversation?”

Nora hesitated. Alcohol-logged, her head tipped: yes no no yes no. They could both see the ending from here; they would approach it but retreat. They would retreat.

“My roommates will worry.”

“Text them.”

“My phone died.”

“Don’t be boring,” he grinned, cutting the engine. “Dip into your Retirement Fun. I’ll get you a cab back.”

Some force inside her crushed the word No and all its permutations. A voice, spectral and transatlantic, persuaded Nora that she was just being coy. Maybe Julian heard it, too.

He unbuckled and exited the car. She examined the street from her window—it was after one in the morning and she didn’t know the area. Hadn’t paid attention while they drove. For a moment, she remained seated, then she stepped into the night, crossing her arms in the cold. “I really am tired, Julian.” It was September and everything smelled like Halloween.

He stepped up to the building and unlocked the door. “Second floor,” he said.

It was an old building, with intricate ironwork on the stairs. She focused on the materials of the scene to persuade herself of its reality. The pit of an apricot on the floor. Filth encrusting the tiles. A pair of hiking boots and a rogue cat toy. Julian opened the door to the rental apartment, which was clean and impersonal.

What will happen next, wondered Nora from the corner of the room as she watched her body sit on the couch, watched the man pour two glasses of wine from the open bottle in the fridge. There was a stag’s head mounted above the plugged fireplace. Both the young woman and her young body watched the stag, willing it to spring to life and derail the scene. It was the first time she articulated the truth to herself so explicitly: I do not want to be here.

“Can I tell you something, Nora?” Julian looked older in the apartment, in the glow of a copper lamp. “Just between you and me? I don’t want to burden you with my little problems. You’re just…you’re a great listener and an old friend and I need to get this off my chest.”

He studied her face. She wondered what he found there.

“Well,” he began carefully. “You know I love Amber. I do. Honest to God—and you know I’m a Catholic through and through—I adore her with everything I have. There’s no one like Amber. But she just can’t…she just can’t give me what I need. I miss passion, I miss being needed. I need that.” He took a sip of wine. “Have you ever felt that way in a relationship? Like you’ve become…disposable?”

She nodded.

“She doesn’t want kids.”

Blinked.

“This is probably too much.”

Shook her head.

“You’re lucky you’re young.”

Did nothing.

“I mean, I’m able to give her what a guy should have to take pills to give—all day, you know? But all she does is work. She’s addicted to her work. It’s all about her job and her dancers, all the time, nonstop. Every time I try to be with her, she says she’s too tired. She only wants it at, like, the crack of dawn.”

The stag’s eyes were set far apart and framed in black lashes, his fur reddish and beautiful, the horns badly glued. Why were they glued?

“But.” Julian moved closer, touching Nora’s arm. “It’s not the end of the world.”

Heat radiated from him.

“I gotta say.” His eyes lowered. “I looked in the mirror before I left and almost didn’t come tonight. I just thought: dear God, I look so old.”

Nora tried to speak, but somewhere between the passenger seat and this sofa cushion, lifting her side of the conversation from the internal to the external became an impossibly heavy endeavor. He didn’t mind, or perhaps even register, her silence. He tugged her sweater from her shoulder. Something familiar. The elixir of spooky enchantment pooled in her mouth like cheap vodka and she wanted him to touch her more. Wanted it like acupuncture. Like Aspirin. She wanted to bolt. “I hope you know how breathtaking you are,” he whispered. “Look at me.”

She tried.

“It’s painful,” he said. “Your beauty.” She cringed. He touched her bare knee and the sensation reverberated. “You’ve got to have more confidence.” His hand moved up her thigh and she was surprised to feel sweat on his palms. The taste in her mouth was acidifying—from fearful charm to charming fear to fear. “You of all people deserve it.”

Well.

“Well.” She cleared her throat and moved away from him. “I’m really tired.”

They were both startled by the sound of her voice. He blinked, ran a hand through his hair. “How about some music? For energy?”

He got up and turned on a pair of speakers, then searched his phone for a song. He selected something brassy that made Nora jump as it roared to life. He turned up the volume. “I wrote this,” he said. More eye contact, probing hers. Another boyish grin and his teeth glowed. “About a threesome I had one time, believe it or not. Before I was married.” The words were wet on his tongue. He resumed his place on the couch. “Feels like forever ago.” Nora receded into the leather and told her legs to move, but they had powered down. “Amber’s not a fan.”

“Have you ever cheated on her?”

“What?”

“Your wife.”

He paused. “No.”

“Should…get—”

“Just one song.”

An impulse to play dead made Nora close her eyes. Presently, she felt his finger, long and smooth, run along her collarbone. “I love this part of you,” he whispered. “I couldn’t help staring at it all night. So delicate.” Finger on wrist. Jawline. The way she would run her finger along immaculate, just-dusted surfaces. She felt like a piano. “You intimidate me.”

She stacked words on her tongue, tried to say something. He tucked a lock of hair behind her ear and her system began to flood. Crash. She shut her mouth. Tried not to let it go slack. Retreated into the too-loud jazz while he ran his finger along her neck. The music swung. Throat. A snare drum. Thigh. The saxophone. Chest. A voice. Lips. He edged beneath her dress. She tried to move but her body was malfunctioning. Things went quiet, her limbs numb. She held her breath and held her voice, held herself, her grip, gripped the leather and wanted to run, wanted to sprint into traffic but did nothing. Did nothing.

“Your heart’s beating so fast,” he breathed.

“Wait.” She tripped over the syllable. “Wait.”

“Don’t be shy, Nora. Have confidence.”

He hovered his lips near her neck and exhaled—not a kiss, not recognizable, nothing. This was not what she wanted. What did she want? He lifted and rearranged her legs on the couch. When he removed her high heels, she felt totally exposed.

The word was there, loaded in her throat. She coughed it higher, then held it under her tongue. Julian was sweating. He was nervous and shaky with some kind of fever. He was breakable. Stop. On her tongue the word tasted impolite, ungrateful, humiliating. Heavy as a bowling ball. She had furnished this scene herself, agreed to drinks, exited the car, followed him up the stairs, seen the ending, and walked toward it. She answered the phone—always answered the phone. His hand was like a surgeon’s, suspended over her skin. Lift the word. Say it. It was right there, ready—set—had she said it? Count to three. Try again. “Wait.”

“No one would know. You can relax.”

He unzipped the side of her dress and pried her out of the fabric.

“Wait.”

His hand on her breast. “Nora,” he breathed.

Speak. Move. Stand up. Walk out. Imagine you’ve been cast as a different woman—the kind who would protest and leave without apology. You’re not tied to the furniture. There’s no knife to your throat.

“Stop,” she said.

“Relax,” he whispered, his hand traveling to the lace of her underwear.

 “Stop,” she repeated, louder now.

“I just want to make you feel good.”

“Stop.”

“It’s okay, Nora.”

She tried to get up but he held her to the couch. She lassoed all her will and tried again, but he pushed her deeper into the leather. “You want this,” he said.

“Stop,” she said, but her face was going numb. To say the word, to move at all, required such a disproportionate amount of energy, the effort shut her down, and by the time he wet his hand, she felt she possessed no more animation than a dead electronic. Even amid the dissonance between what she wanted to do and what she felt capable of doing, Nora understood that it was happening how it often happened, but while it was happening, it felt unbearably singular. Instances of more violent scenarios flooded her mind—things that happened to people she knew, things she read about, things she saw on the news. Weapons, torture, blackmail, groups, murder. It could be worse. On a loop in her brain. It could be worse.

“You want this,” he repeated.

From the corner, Nora watched her body. A bolder woman’s dress in a mound on the floor. The dress’s rightful owner never would have gotten into a situation like this, and Nora felt guilty for implicating the fabric, as though she had visited a nursing home with the flu. She saw long hair tangled on the leather, a pink face. She watched her childhood piano teacher remove his own clothes with precision, folding them before setting them on the coffee table. “This is so overdue,” Julian said. She watched her body play dead. Listened to the man say, “Tell me what you like,” and saw him kiss her skin, her neck and lips and breasts and thighs, but did not feel it. “You feel so good.”

 On the couch, through someone else’s jamming pain, Nora kept her eyes closed. Neither she nor her body could determine how much time passed. When he was almost done, she opened her eyes, watched the stag as the stag watched back. She felt her chest go wet, then closed her eyes again.

Julian kissed her forehead, his stubble sharp. He cleaned off her chest with his boxers. Dressed her gently, helped her sit. When she finally opened her eyes, she kept them downcast.

“Hey—look at me,” he murmured. “Talk to me.”

She could not remember the mechanics or purpose of speech. Holding herself upright was a full-time occupation.

“I wish you could stay the night,” he said as he tapped his phone, summoning a car. “But my flight’s at seven in the morning, so.”

He didn’t know. Was it possible? She stepped into her heels, unable to feel them against her skin. A nearby explosion had deafened her nerves. She was shaking so hard she had trouble standing, balancing, picking up her purse.

“Wait,” he said before she opened the door to leave. More alarm. “You’re—God, forgive me, but I—I mean. You’re eighteen, right?”

She faltered, her eyes on the brass under her hand. She skipped two grades. Attended a small school in a small town in a small life.

“Nora?”

She nodded once, and Julian exhaled.

“Goes without saying that we’ll…you know, keep this between us.”

She nodded. He cleared the hair from her shoulder and kissed her neck, her cheek, her lifeless mouth. “Goodnight, Nora,” he said, and she left.

Back in her dormitory, hovered over the toilet, she vomited as her phone buzzed.

I adore you, kid. Sleep well.

◆

From then on, the night stalked her, slipping pieces of itself under her pillow, into her pockets, between the pages of her books. Watching her from the mirror. Extracting her thoughts and tying them around her neck. Amplifying the neon wish that asserted itself during the break-in, clear even amid her mental cacophony. A wish as grotesque as it was real.

I hope he’s enjoying himself.

◆

Nora stops screaming.

In the ringing silence, the women study each other from across the den, two bodies trembling from different inevitabilities. Good friends in primary colors never did ask Nora questions over cornbread; she abjured the interrogation by locking that night in her skull.

“Congratulations,” whispers Irene. “You’re a saint.”

The doorbell rings.

Irene shrinks into her purple hood. “Don’t answer it.”

“Police,” says a man. A knock. “Open up.”

Nora doesn’t move. For a moment, she thinks they might be here to arrest him, or arrest her. Her face is wet.

More pounding on the door, then the doorbell again.

“Fine,” Irene says. “Fine.” She reaches for her cane, rises from her chair, and dons the trapper hat over her hood. Hunched in the firelight, with her purple cloak and sparkly cane, Irene resembles a witch more than ever. After peering through the keyhole, she opens the door.

“Good evening ma’am,” says a young police officer, standing beside an older officer on the welcome mat. “How are you tonight?”

“Is this about the coyote? I don’t have a goddamn cat.”

“We’re here in response to a noise complaint.”

“Oh, this is rich.”

“Sorry?”

“Was it Susan Pulchinski who called you? I’ll bet my life it was Susan Pulchinski.”

“There was a report of yelling.”

“Yelling? We were having a conversation, woman-to-woman.”

The officers eye Nora, and she hastily wipes her tears. When they smile at her, she hates them with a boiling, scarlet rage she recognizes from childhood and dreams.

“We’re only here to help,” says the younger one.

“We don’t need any help,” spits Irene.

“We just want to make sure everyone’s okay,” says the older one.

“Let me tell you,” grins Irene. “We’re just a pair of wolves, howling at the moon. Everything is honkey-dopey over here.”

“Hunky-dory?” chuckles the younger one.

“We’re doing just fine.”

Horns begin to bellow, and the volume is astonishingly loud. It takes a moment for Nora to identify the source: the freight trains. She’s never heard them from Irene’s house before—never knew how much closer Irene’s is to the tracks than her mother’s farmhouse—and she is shocked by the sound’s power.

“Do you hear this!” Irene shouts over the din, pointing outside. “I’ll show you a noise complaint!”

“Yeah, it’s for sure a problem!” yells the younger officer. “But this was designated a Quiet Zone, and the mayor—”

“Quiet Zone, my ass!” Irene removes the trapper hat and launches it at Nora. She catches, bewildered. “Put it on!” instructs Irene.

Without thinking, sick with exhaustion, Nora obeys. It’s warm and soft, with a thickness that muffles the noise. “If you can’t beat them,” growls Irene, showing her teeth, “you’ve got to join them.”