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I’m so tired I hurt. So pissed off at Pi that I almost feel awake again. But I know that sleep is a necessary evil. I let my deep memories lead my feet, unsteady with wine, up the stairs and down the hall to my old bedroom. Shouldering the door open, my hand lands on the switch, once more right where it should be. The room brightens, and I gulp for air.

In the City, it’s not all that uncommon to happen into perfectly preserved spaces. Though I’m usually searching for libraries, I’ve blundered into sewing nooks and laundry rooms and walk-in closets. There’s a hush, a reverence, as it happens, an involuntary flashback to some part of my own life.

Sometimes I visit these spaces intentionally. Last year, I made my annual ballet memorial trek through the dressing rooms of the Company. I wandered the row of women’s lockers, trying to resist the urge to cry over the rat-chewed satin and tulle littering the room—a feat made easier with Danny trailing behind me, proclaiming that once a place smells like feet, the place will always smell like feet, come hell or high water, as will the people who spend their time in such places. People like dancers.
All dancers but me, right?
He’d remained mercifully silent.

But the laugh he would’ve loosed over the pink monstrosity of my preteen bedroom would have been heard clear to the Survivor camp. Nary a scrap of wallpaper can be seen beneath the adages illustrated with dancers in unlikely poses, posters of new satin slippers juxtaposed with ratty leg warmers, and playbills from trips to places that probably no longer exist. Tiaras and headpieces, favorite tutus, and worn-out pointe shoes hang from tattered ribbons. The corners of my four-poster bed are draped with costumes I left behind, sweated through and outgrown, and dried bouquets of roses. It’s the work of an insane balletomane. There is no trace of me here, though. No real person, just ruffles and hopes. I don’t remember being this myopic, but here is the evidence.

My mom had said we’d start fresh in the City. And we did. I left the dream behind and headed straight into the reality, for better or worse.

Though it’s possible I’d taken a few steps toward adulthood back then. I stumble over to the white desk in the far corner and open the center drawer. Turning my palm up, it only takes me two or three pats to find the pack of cigarettes I taped there after Cas and Len and I tried smoking them out behind their barn.

Some of the girls at the dance school had promised cigarettes would help me stay thin. I was desperate to fit in back then, to succeed, to drag Cas and Len with me through the door of rebellion, but the coughing didn’t seem worth it the way it did after I hit puberty. Now cigarettes are nearly impossible to find.

“Smoke ’em if you got ’em,” I say to a dancer’s shiny poster face.

The matches are dry and the cigarettes even drier, but the burn feels good in my lungs, appropriately punishing, and smoking in my room—this fuchsia-plastered dream of an earlier me—feels appropriately rebellious.

It occurs to me that there is no one left in my life to care. I sink into the pink pile carpet and cry.

CHAPTER FOUR

Syd

Something is pounding in my head and at first I think it’s a hangover and then I’m sure it is and then I’m sure it’s something else, too. It takes me a few seconds to remember where the hell I am. I’m in a bed and there’s light streaming through a window. The room is very brown, very boring, very guest room-y, which is when I recognize the stupid dogs-playing-cards picture on the wall, and the night before comes flooding back along with the adrenaline that accompanies the sound of the front door opening, and footsteps bounding up the stairs. Someone is knocking at the door of my old bedroom, where I decamped last night for someplace less nostalgic. Because the person is knocking out the rhythm to “shave and a haircut,” my reptile brain relaxes. It is—it can only be—Cas.

“In here,” I croak. But she’s yelling my name too loudly to hear me. I trip my way out of bed, having alligator-rolled myself up in an infernal beige comforter. I crash into a dresser trying to get untangled, my inner thighs and back muscles screaming as I try to right myself. Cas lets out a squeal. “Syd, is that you?”

I want to say something smart, but I’m mostly focusing on not strangling her. “Who did you think it would be?”

Her torso cranes around the doorframe into the guest room. “You nearly scared me half to death.”

“And yet you are the one breaking and entering.”

She shrugs apologetically. “I just figured since the hide-a-key was still there . . .”

That damned key. I didn’t rehide it because I hadn’t remembered its existence, let alone its location. “In the crook of the big rock?”

“In the elbow of the little aspen,” she says, as if I’ve forgotten her birthday. Which, coincidentally, I have. “What are you doing in here?”

“Did you see in there?” I point toward my old room. Then I cross my arms over my chest, glad I’m at least wearing a T-shirt and the superhero underwear I wrestled Danny for inside the discarded detritus of a discount mart.

Cas turns back to my bedroom across the hall. “You might have a point.” She wanders through the door and drops onto the floor where I’d left an old photo album open the night before. “But Syd. So many memories. I kind of love it.”

“I’m thinking of charging admission, calling it The Cave of TuTu Much.” I follow her in and relocate the cigarettes. It’s funny how quickly habits can be taken back up. “Want one?”

Cas coughs and waves her hand in front of her face. “No. Gross.”

“Aren’t you going to ask me where I found them?” I can’t believe she’s not shocked to see a cigarette.

“The Wagners have a tobacco farm. The mercantile sells their stuff these days, anyway.”

And here I’d lived years thinking I’d never smoke again. I blow a smoke ring at her. “You don’t remember this box? You and me and Len smoking these out on the ridge?”

She shakes her head.

So much for the poignancy of childhood antics. “Well, Cas, to what do I owe the pleasure of your company?”

“I’m here to help you. You know, clean the stalls. See if you need a dress for tonight. Remember?”

“Are the horses even up yet?”

“The horse. Singular. Unless Pi is home. And yes. It’s three in the afternoon. Even horses are up.” Cas starts with condemnation and ends with disappointment. I don’t know what I expected of our friendship, after all these years. I didn’t expect whatever this is, this strange transfer of power. “But I guess you must be pretty tired.” She does not sound convinced.

“Wait, you can grow tobacco here?” I ask, rewinding. Last night’s trot through cool, green grass comes back to me. Out the window are the same dusty streets of old, but the hills beyond are dark green with sage instead of sandstone. Another hank of memory barges through my mind—my mother cursing the rocky soil, her latest gardening experiments limp, spindly, brown, or all three. “Since when?”

“Since the Blessing.” She looks away from me when she says it, the condemnation all at once conspicuously absent.

“Humph.” I want to say many things, but Pi’s warning stops me. For the moment.

She carefully closes the photo album and sets it on top of the bed. “Where do you want to start?” she asks, rising from her cross-legged position.

“Well, I’m going to finish this cigarette, and then I was hoping to try out some of this hot water I’ve heard so much about.”

The look on her face is the one I’ve wanted since she met me at the car, so I’m not sure why it infuriates me further. “Are you being funny?” she murmurs. “I can’t tell if you’re being funny.”

I turn my back on her and head down the stairs. I’m relatively sure I saw a can of Folgers on the counter last night and I’ll be damned if I’m not going to drink a whole pot of it single-handedly.

“Look, I know I’m doing this wrong, Syd.” Cas is at the head of the stairs and I stop at the bottom. “I’m not, you know, like you. I’m not cool. I’m not citified.”

I take one last drag of the cigarette before I stub it out in the pot of what might have once been a fern. “I think what I can’t get my head around is that you don’t know there is no cool anymore. There’s no citified. There’s nothing. No celebrities, no national tabloids, no papers, no trends. There’s no fashion, no cars, no travel, no art, no singing, no painting . . .”

“Fine. Don’t yell. I get it, okay?”

“Okay.”

“So I guess that means no dancing, either?”

If only I’d allowed myself to choke her earlier.

Cas drop steps her way down the stairs, deep in thought. When she gets to the bottom she sits. “Will you tell me?”

I end up talking while Cas takes over the coffee and makes a grocery list. I sit on the same stool Pi sat on, and I tell her about going to the City and starting at the Company.

We make an effort to go out and look at the barns. Cas heads right to the rail, offering something from her pocket, a browned apple slice in the palm of her hand. “They left you the gray to ride.”

“Thoughtful,” I croak.

My dad’s gray gelding stands in the shade of the barn sleeping, head down, looking—appropriately—as if he’s lost his best friend. I will my feet forward, but I meet with a wall of denial. Somehow walking into the paddock will make this all real, instead of theoretical.

“I’m sorry, Cas. I just don’t think I can do this part right now.”

And so we go back inside and drink more of the stale Folgers. Polite yet firm, Cas shoves me toward the shower, and sits on the closed toilet while I talk above the running water about my mother and the flu and how they quarantined us in place, and I’m glad I’m in there so it doesn’t look like I’m crying, even though I am, and not just about my mother but at the warm, filthy water swirling around my ankles, my aching thighs, and a bruise on my bicep that’s throbbing, though I can’t quite see it, even when I crane myself into a dangerous position and almost meet my death at the hands of my own
toilette
.

When the water’s not filthy anymore, Cas hands me a towel and I explain how there was relatively little disorder until the very end. And as I dry off, I tell her about Danny and Agnes and Mina and Buster and our efforts to rebuild.

I really don’t have time to wax rhapsodic about the City because Cas is steering me toward my bedroom, where we open up my closet and are immediately rewarded by an eruption of sequins we try to stuff back behind the bulging doors.

“Where did your mom keep the clothes that didn’t fit her anymore?”

This takes significant brainpower. My mom cleared out the closet she shared with my dad. That much I remember, sitting on the floor, handing her pairs of shoes. “I don’t know if she even . . .”

“Everyone keeps old clothes that don’t fit,” she declares, oblivious once again to a world somewhat devoid of the divisions of
old
and
new
and
fit
and
doesn’t fit
. “Guest room?”

So we come full circle to the very brown room. My new room, I decide, and lo and behold, in the closet there are faded denim shirts and tatty-edged jeans, old bouclé suits—all clean and soft and somehow still smelling of her. I’m crying again and Cas pats me awkwardly. “Do you need a hug?” she whispers.

“I most certainly do not.” I sidestep away from her, avoiding the shortest route to more tears.

It takes me a few minutes to understand there’s a range of sizes in the closet, and then to find a suitable pair of jeans and a tank top. Cas shakes her head and hands me a lightweight floral blouse instead. “I don’t see any dresses in here that will work for tonight,” she says, sliding the hangers together back and forth with an annoying clack. “Look at this!” She’s triumphantly hoisting a floor-length velvet ball gown. “It’s so heavy.”

“I wonder what she wore it to.” I finger the soft, black velvet edged with silver piping. “It’s beautiful.”

“And you’d look beautiful in it. Right after you stuffed your bra. And everything else,” Cas says, trying to keep from laughing.

“Oh my god, Casandra Willis, did you just make a joke?” My melancholy is upended by consciously stupid, but contagious giggles.

“Do you even weigh enough to wear it?” she asks, still laughing.

“I will after dinner.”

And, miraculously, we are, for an hour or so, fourteen again. We straggle down the stairs, suggesting all the least appropriate places to wear my mother’s old dress—the diner, the rodeo, the stockyards.

An hour or so later, we’ve walked to town and pile through the door of the mercantile, still giggling as Cas introduces me to Bill, who now runs things for his parents. I never knew him. Like Cas’s brother Perry, he is one of many lucky enough to have returned to a stable hometown before things went really wrong. He seems like a nice guy, and Cas hands him my grocery list, refusing to add any cigarettes. She tells him to invoice me later. Bill gives me his condolences, but then his attention is on Cas. He’s looking at her like he’s never seen her before, and her face is still lit up and smiling, and the other customers are unable to get his attention.

Cas is oblivious until I tease her about it out on the wooden sidewalk. Her cheeks deepen into rouge dimples. I am walking backwards, singing old nursery rhymes about trees and kisses, when all the blood drains from her face. I simultaneously back into a something stationary. I spin and come face-to-face with the enormous, solemn Bishop.