We wander down a broad empty street, the river, the Kanawha, on one side. We find our way to a white building with columns and a domed roof. It looks like an official building of some kind, powerful and secretive. I’ve forgotten the gardening gloves and my hands are cold. We walk up the steps and stand between the columns and look out at the river winding through the powdery blue light.
We continue on, under an overpass, the concrete pillars stained with bird shit, where we can hear the low hum of traffic. We find a little park with a fountain in the center. The tops of the trees are flat and dark like mushroom caps. They cast large shadows on the ground. The ice-crusted grass has become a net for trapping cigarette butts and the metal tongues of beer cans. The fountain is dry. Green pennies are stuck to the bottom. The paint is cracked and tiny weeds are forcing their way through the concrete. We climb into the base of the fountain and look out at the world around us.
“I was in a Hospital,” I tell Marcus. “I didn’t think I was ever going to leave.”
I stand there and absorb the force of that feeling. It is a physical recognition, a warm pressure in the center of my belly. In the Hospital, in the unending cold of winter, I began to believe that I would never again see another city or park or monument or river. I began to believe that version of my story, but that version turned out to be wrong, because here I am in the capital of West Virginia, with Marcus, on my way to find my mother.
I should be free of that feeling now, hundreds of miles from the Hospital, but the shadow of it hangs over me, like there’s a part of me that is still locked up and will never be anything but locked up.
“You got out.” Marcus rubs his plastic lips. “You’ll always get out.”
“I got out,” I say, hoping to convince that locked-up part of myself.
I jump onto the edge of the fountain. I place my hands on my belly. I feel the warm pressure building. I stare out into the night and scream and am stunned by my own loudness. Marcus jumps up beside me. He grabs my hand, hot and slick, and we scream together. I see our voices rising into the trees and getting tangled up in the branches, making nests of sound.
Eventually we walk away, calling out everything we know about rabbits. Rabbits are excellent at leaping and digging and running. For their entire lives, their teeth keep growing. They can live everywhere except for in Antarctica. They can infect people with rabbit fever, a disease that makes the patients sweat and itch. They like the dark. They do not like to be alone.
Just when the city is starting to feel like it belongs to us, the city sets us straight.
We are away from the park, wandering down a narrow side street, when a mob of people dressed in black, their faces painted a ghoulish white, rush out from behind the corner of a building. A cavalry of acrobats, I think, even though I know enough to know “cavalry” and “acrobat” are not two words that belong together.
We stop in the center of the street. These people are charging toward us and before we can escape, we are in the thick of the pack. I see holes in their black shirts and patches where the white paint has faded, revealing the humanness beneath. Wild eyes. Beneath us the asphalt rumbles. Marcus is carried away from me. I see the yellow fluff spilling from his coat. We cast our arms forward like swimmers in a roiling sea, trying to fight our way back to each other.
These people don’t stop or speak or try to take us with them. They run with animal indifference, like those horses in Paola. I don’t know who they are or what they have decided to be.
For a second, I am tempted to follow them.
Marcus disappears from sight. I tumble toward the edge of the group. I try to break free. My toes get stomped on, a jab to my tailbone makes me howl, the vibrations of their running moves like electricity through my body. I tuck my chin to my chest and push my way through.
There is a moment that must be like the eye of a storm, where the noise of the footsteps is so loud, so overwhelming to the senses, it becomes a kind of silence. I turn inside the dark swirl. Mouths open, feet strike asphalt, and I can’t hear any of it. I see an orange helicopter hovering over an ocean and the white froth of the water below and my mother on a stretcher, sealed inside a world where there is no noise and all the hands working the straps belong to one body and the borders of the ocean are not borders at all, because they are endless.
*
The stampede leaves our hearts pounding and our hands shaking and that warm pressure in my belly is being replaced with something as cold and hard as stone. Marcus’s rabbit mask has gotten twisted on his face. An eyehole has been displaced to a temple. I watch him put his features back in order. We stand on the empty side street until the vibrations have dripped out of our bodies and the asphalt has gone still under out feet.
We start back to the Econo Lodge, but we get lost. We go down street after street. In the dark all the buildings look the same. For a while, we run like the people in black, but eventually we get tired and fall into a stumbling walk. Who are we kidding? We find ourselves under the same overpass, back in the same park with the mushroom trees, back inside the fountain, circling and circling. This time we don’t jump inside and scream.
Panic creeps in, winds its way around my bones. What if we are searching like this forever? What if morning never comes? In the park, Marcus closes his eyes and tries to see our street and our motel and the way back, but his imagination is not feeling cooperative either.
We wander down a street where all the traffic lights are a dull red. We see a little white building called Johnny’s Luncheonette, a gas station called Stop & Go. Instead of being tucked into the pumps, the nozzles are all lying on the ground like they were once an alive thing that someone has killed. The inside of the station is aglow with light.
Behind the counter we find a man in a Kiss T-shirt. His chin is barbed with dark hair. He has a lazy eye. We tell him that we’re lost.
“What are you trying to find?”
“The Econo Lodge. Washington Street.”