The floor is blanketed in frozen leaves. As we go down, they crunch like tiny bones.
I dream about the Hospital. I’m alone, in one of those white hallways, the window a distant arch at the end. I’m standing under a speaker and the most terrible noise is pouring into me. It is Dr. Bek’s rasping breath, only much louder than before, like a team of hazmatted people are standing around a microphone and speaking into it. In the dream, I have been in this hallway, listening to this noise, for many years. I want to stop the noise, to knock the speaker off the wall, to tear out the wires, but I have no way to do such a thing. I don’t have any of the right skills and that seems like the worst part, my inability to save myself.
When I stop dreaming, I’m grabbing at leaves and daylight is streaming through two coffin-shaped windows and large hawkish birds are perched on the wooden beams above. I can see light coming through the holes in the walls. I hear a rustling in the corners and the wind outside.
I sit up. A pebble falls out of my ear. Leaves are trapped in my hair. My mouth feels like it’s full of gravel. Dirt is stuck to my arms. There is a sloshing in my stomach. One of the hawkish birds swoops down and lands on the ground. It pushes the leaves around and then flies away with a small squirming thing clutched in its beak.
I shake Marcus awake.
We get up. We look around. We touch the walls of the barn, searching for liquid, condensation, melting ice. We are that thirsty. That desperate to get what we need to survive. On the walls, there is no liquid, just dust that sticks to our fingers. It hurts to walk, to bend down, to look up, to breathe. Outside we find small patches of snow and we eat them. I take off my gardening gloves and scoop the ice into my palms and lap at it like a dog. The snow has rocks in it and tastes like dirt.
*
When we leave the barn, the afternoon sun is low and fading, like all the color is being slowly sucked out, and we realize we are on the edge of a property. From a distance, we can see an old house on a hill, a two-story with a dormer roof and a sagging wraparound porch. The dark splotches on the roof where shingles are missing look like water curving around land on a map. The white paint is peeling. The front door is knobless. A neon yellow skull has been graffitied in the center. A tall metal frame stands to the left of the house, as though the structure was abandoned mid-renovation.
A young woman is on the porch in a nubby sweater and corduroy pants and rubber boots. I appreciate the soft look of her clothing. On the road softness is something I miss.
There is something strange about her body, something misshapen, and it’s not until we reach the edge of the front yard that I see the white angel wings hanging from her back.
She waves to us, this woman.
We cross the yard, through the mud and slush. We watch the woman pet her wings. We tell the woman our names. We say we’re looking for a place to sleep. We ask if she can help us.
The woman’s name is Darcie. She has freckles on her eyelids. The tips of her front teeth are stained caramel. She lives here with a man, Nelson, and they call this place the Mansion. She tells us we can stay for as long as we like.
“The Mansion always has room,” she says, opening the door.
Inside she gives us water in Mason jars. There’s grit floating in the bottom, but we couldn’t care less. We hold our jars with both hands and gulp the water. I close my eyes and feel the cool slip down my throat. I chew the grit when it gets stuck in my teeth. Exhaustion has brought on strange pains in my face: aches in the jaw, along my hairline, in the spaces between my eyes.
There is no sign of this other person, this Nelson. The Mansion is warm and quiet.
“Where did you come from?” Darcie wants to know.
We’re standing in a dim kitchen, and I can make out a big metal sink and long windows. White candles, burned to waxy nubs, on the sills. An old boxy refrigerator. The door is ajar and I catch the scent of rot.
A blue tile floor streaked with mud, like a sky with a storm rolling in.
“From the west,” we reply.
Darcie rests a fist under her chin, like she’s giving careful thought to our origins, to what it means to have come from the west. Two downy feathers fall from her wings and into the shadows below.
When we ask where she came from, she tells us that she cannot remember.
*
Darcie gives us a room on the second floor. This room is empty except for a bare mattress with a white sheet. The floorboards are swollen. The walls are peeling. A window overlooks the backyard, a small sprawl of land surrounded by a halo of leafless trees and then dark woods, the rounded treetops stretching into the beyond. On one wall, we find a series of stick figures drawn in pencil. The figures are taking shits and fucking and choking each other. LIFE WHO NEEDS IT someone has written below them in big jagged letters.
Once we’re alone, the sky turning dark outside, Marcus asks how I’m feeling and I tell him I’m feeling sad.
I sit down on the mattress. “I thought we would have gotten farther by now.” When I left the Hospital I thought I would just keep going and going, all the way to Florida. I didn’t foresee being so thoroughly beaten by the elements, for my mother to still feel so far away.
“Here’s something,” Marcus says. “In a bathroom in West Virginia, I saw a sign telling people to not use toilet water for drinking. There was a drawing of a man dunking his head in the toilet with a big red X over it.”