“The boy you ran away with?”
“Aunt Diane said that he blew himself up trying to make a bomb. Just a couple of months after he ditched me. I'm not glad it happened; on the other hand, I'm not sad he's gone. He hurt me. I had nothing, you understand. Some money he'd stolen, but that lasted me precisely one month, and I spent another three on the skids till I found a job waiting tables at the Waffle House out by the airport, and I'd still be there with a child. Took me another two years to save up enough money to come up here and find this place—remember what a hole in the wall it was?”
“First time we met, you were on your hands and knees scrubbing this floor. More like praying.” Maya smiled at the memory. “Praying for me to come along and help you.”
Erica grabbed her hand. “That's right.”
The click of nails across the ceramic tiles heralded the arrival of the dogs. Pausing to sniff the disturbed air in the kitchen, they wagged their tails out of politeness, then moved to the hallway, having heard a stirring in the spare bedroom long before the humans, to await Diane's entrance. She emerged, momentarily taken aback by the sudden strangeness of her situation, weaving through her overtired memory to place them, and herself. “Good morning, you devils.” They lifted their noses, and she scratched one bearded chin and then the other.
On the way into the kitchen, Diane tripped over a flat piece of pine that marked the threshold, lost her footing, and flew, paddling the air like a double-bladed windmill to catch her balance, banging the meaty part of her thigh against the table's edge. The teacups separated from their saucers. A dish fell to the tiles and shattered into a hundred little pieces. The dogs barked at the new game, and Maya jumped up to steady her while Erica shooed them away from the shards.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” she said. “You'll send the whole house down upon our ears. Are you all right, Aunt Diane?”
“Who would nail a board there, right in the middle of the one room with the most traffic? A person could break a neck.” She hobbled to a chair. “I'm fine, though this leg will never be the same. And good morning to you, Maya, and to you, Erica or Mary, whichever it is.”
“Just catching her up on our conversation last night. The saga of Mary Gavin.” She swept the pieces into a dustpan and dumped the mess into the trash. With a twist of the wrist, she put the kettle on to boil.
Her aunt rubbed the sore spot and sat down next to Maya. “We're used to switching names. Most of my childhood, I'm Diane Mullins. Along comes Big Joe Cicogna, and all of a sudden everyone thinks I'm Italian.”
Tracing a signature on the tabletop, Maya said, “I was born Sophie Voorsanger in Brooklyn, New York, but I haven't even said that name in thirty years. Left it all behind with the past.” She looked up from her invisible writing. “Maya is a Hindu concept for the ways we allow the material world to disguise the reality of the spiritual. That's why I chose the name. La vida es sue?o“
Through the open curtains, Erica watched the man out by the fir trees grab the sculpture to hoist himself to his feet. Older now, his hair gone white, he was thinner and slightly humpbacked, but still the wound suppurated, his eye had swollen shut, and the stain on his shirt rusted and spread into the shape of a panhandle. In his right fist, he grasped the blunderbuss of a pen, dripping red ink, and seconds after she first conjured him, the dead man took the first lurching steps toward the house.
“And I'm Mary Gavin because Erica Quinn once killed a man.”
“Killed a man?” Diane asked.
“In a grocery store in Garrison's Creek, Oklahoma. Wiley told me to wait outside with a gun and to come in if there was any trouble, and there was trouble. He looked like he had a gun too, and was going to shoot Wiley, and Wiley fired, then I fired, and we were so scared we ran out.”
Diane stood and reached out to her. “You poor thing, don't you know? That man survived. We heard from the FBI that he was one of their best leads. The man was wounded, but he lived and gave the police a description of you two, but you must have been long gone—”
“He was dead.”