We go around to the back of the post office, to the large Dumpster pressed against the brick. We watch Nelson and Darcie climb into the Dumpster and stand knee-deep in trash. Darcie’s wings bob on her back. Nelson fishes out a withered apple and tosses it to Marcus. A plastic bag holding a quarter loaf of bread, the crust spongy with green mold, follows. A jar with a few spoonfuls of peanut butter inside. I get to hold the jar and can already feel the thick nutty paste on my tongue. There is something gummy on the label and little black bugs are crawling through it. They get inside the gardening gloves and nip at my hands.
Nelson finds a pack of sparklers too. The package has a cartoon of a white wolf on the front. He draws a sparkler from the pack and sniffs it, then passes it to Darcie. I think of the slender antenna glowing blue on my mother’s ship, the St. Elmo’s fire.
“Abracadabra.” Darcie waves the sparkler over her head. “Hocus pocus.”
Even when she’s smiling, her eyes are glassy and rolling, like she’s not really thinking about the here but about all the fearful things off in the distance, on the edges of the land.
What kind of spell is she casting?
*
That night, we light the sparklers in the backyard. We’re all wearing garbage bag jackets. Underneath the plastic, Darcie’s wings are a dark mass. Nelson ignites the first sparkler with a match, nudges the tip of his against the rest. Four globes of light that make our faces glow. I catch Darcie in profile and for a moment she looks like the girl who attacked me in the bathroom in Mission Hill, but then the light changes and she turns back into herself again.
Tricks, I think.
Nelson is the first to break from the group, yelping and bolting toward the trees. We run around the yard. We slip in the cold mud, leaving behind arcs of gold.
Earlier, on the second floor, I opened the copy of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. The spine creaked. The pages were crusted with water stains. I read: “In the very heart of an extinct volcano, the interior of which has been invaded by the sea, after some great convulsion of the earth. Whilst you were sleeping, Professor, the Nautilus penetrated this lagoon by a natural canal, which opens about ten yards beneath the surface of the ocean.”
A great convulsion of the earth, or at least our American corner of it. Isn’t that what we have all lived through?
I closed the book and stuck my mother’s photo and the postcard between the pages.
In the backyard, I can feel the space between past and future growing larger, like we have been crossing a river by hopping from one little island of rock to another and now the distance between the islands is expanding and we know that if we miscalculate our next jump, if we fall into the water, the river will twist itself around our ankles and drag us under. So for now we are staying still, Marcus and me. Still.
My sparkler has burned down to a black nothing and the heat stings my fingers. I drop it and the light fizzles. The magic is over, at least for tonight. Soon I lose sight of Darcie. Only Marcus and Nelson are still burning. I stand in the massive shadow of the Mansion and watch Marcus cut through the darkness. His mask is a streak of white, his body slender and quick. I hear the zap of his sparkler going out and his rabbit face vanishes, like we are lights that are being turned off one at a time.
As I listen to us move through the yard, the crunch of slush, the sucking sound of shoes on mud, I think about how this is what our childhoods could have been like if it had been all kids and no parents or people pretending to be.
*
The twin paradox isn’t Nelson’s only theory. He lives at the very top of the Mansion, in the attic bedroom, a cramped space with a low roof. Up there I see few signs of it being a place where a person actually sleeps. It looks more like a laboratory: cloudy beakers, a long pair of metal tongs, an eyedropper, a cutting knife, goggles scattered across the floor, the lenses scratched and fogged.
A small oval window, like a porthole on a ship, overlooks the gray-green front yard, the grass lightly marbled with snow. From the window I can see the scaffolding. Nelson tells us that he knows the dimensions of this room so well, he can work in here at night, going by feel.
Three white bowling pins and a black ball are jammed into a corner. “Bowling helps me concentrate,” Nelson says when he sees me nudging the ball around with my toe.
“Concentrate on what?” I ask.
“Darcie had the sickness,” he tells us. He’s not wearing his garbage bag jacket, just a white T-shirt, sweat dark around the underarms, and gray pants. I can see that his body has been stripped to the essentials. Every part is sharp and shadow thin. “But I got to her in time. She forgot, but she didn’t die.”
Darcie is sitting in a corner, her angel wings smushed against the wall, and picking mud out from under her fingernails. “It’s true. He found me on the side of the road in Cordova, in Tennessee, and brought me here.”
She gathers the mud on a knuckle. Once she has made a little dark lump, she eats it.
“Darcie is what we call lucky,” Nelson says.
She tells us that the memories had been pouring from her for days, like a chemical you sweat out. She didn’t know how to stop it, how to hold on to what she knew. She didn’t know where she was headed or where she had come from or why she was wearing angel wings or if the road she was walking could even be called a road. Surely she had the sickness. Surely she should have died.
“There are other things that can make you forget.” I look at the horseshoe-shaped burn marks on the floor. Every time someone moves, the boards creak and I imagine the house keeping track of our whereabouts.
“But what are the odds?” Darcie gathers her hair on one side of her neck and pulls it like a rope. “What are the odds of forgetting for some other reason during an epidemic of forgetting?”
“It’s true.” Marcus picks up the tongs. He makes them open and close like a beak. “What she’s saying about odds.”
“In the Mansion, she started to remember.” Nelson taps the side of his skull. “We got the blood flow redirected, got those capillaries snapping again. Got her consciousness back.”