Sometimes you were impatient for the full moon. Because you were just looking for a reason to run.
I was growing sour to the appurtenances of civilization—the clerks at the stores, the way they smiled politely and bestowed pleasantries on you. The progressive roar of lawn mowers, the tittering of sprinklers.
I went to the mine. It was between moons.
I went to my holy place, the cistern, and I prayed my prayers down into the pit. There were two songs that my father used to sing to me when I was a little girl, and I sang them both down into the void. They echoed and disappeared.
Nothing was the same as it had been.
One day you were one thing, and the next day you were another.
*
Even now.
I bake snickerdoodles for the meeting of the community league at Marcie Klapper-Witt’s house. I pile them high on a cut-crystal platter. Marcie puts them on a long table with other snacks brought by other upstanding members of the community. Fancy, Marcie’s daughter, walks up and down the side of the table, sampling the food. She borrows a brownie, takes one bite, and puts the remainder back on the tray. Same thing with the thumbprint cookies, then the cucumber sandwiches. No one watches her.
There is a planter in the shape of a dachshund, and while the girl stands on tiptoes to reach a platter of truffles on the back of the table I take the planter and place it on the ground just to her right. When she moves to continue down the length of the table, Fancy Klapper-Witt stumbles over the dachshund and falls, the tiara tumbling from her head. She begins to cry, sitting there like a pale pork, her hands raised in supplication.
Her mother rushes over, grabs the girl up in her arms, asks her why she moved the doggie planter.
And me? I retrieve the tiara from the floor and deliver it back onto the feathery blond head of the little girl.
Her mother smiles at me gratefully.
My husband, Jack, does not attend these meetings—but I am surprised to see there a woman I recognize. It’s Jack’s colleague from school—the one who sits on his desk. Her name is Helena, I learn, and she teaches art. Her hands are speckled with dried paint, her fingernails short and scuffed. I don’t speak with her, but I put myself in position to overhear her conversations. She has a very melodious voice, and she is absolutely positive about the world. She just recently moved into the neighborhood from California, of all places. She misses the weather there, but she finds the people here delightful.
I follow her from room to room, remaining unobserved. Helena is attentive and careful, much like me. Once, she goes into the kitchen, and I peek at her from around the corner. I see her rinse her glass in the sink—and then, thinking she’s alone, she picks something from between her teeth with her fingernail and flicks it into the sink.
I like a woman who pays attention to her teeth.
When the meeting itself gets under way, we all sit around in a big circle in the living room. I stay toward the back, leaning on a windowsill, directly to the right of Helena. She has marvelous ideas about the restoration of the local park. When she is lost in thought, I notice, her lips part slightly and she breathes out of her mouth.
Only once do our eyes meet, and she gives me a small, indistinct smile, as though we were casual compatriots. I wonder if we are.
*
It was the middle of March, between moons, and our town had its first spell of spring. Afternoons, I would open the window of my bedroom and let the breeze curl the pages of my homework as I finished it. Then, thinking to avoid my father and Margot Simons, I returned to the mapping of the mines. There were too many people aboveground, too many rivalries, too many betrayals, too many suffocating passions—so I went below and found absolution in the pitch black of those lonely passages.
Underground, the air was tight, and the empty spaces felt like a persistent ache—those crumbled walls, those low overhanging beams that were so soft they sometimes turned to wood dust in your grip. I did not mind stumbling upon dead ends, because it meant I could call an end to whatever tunnel it was on my map. I marked cul-de-sacs with special skull symbols. Pretty soon my map was filled with skulls. You could travel in many directions, but there was only one destination.
That was why, one night, I went deeper into the tunnels than I ever had before. I was reckless with voids made out of possibilities.
Getting lost was not a problem anymore. I’d developed a distinct understanding of the dark, a natural sense of how the tunnels were built and which direction they were going. I could feel, in my bones, the elevation of the earth. I could sniff my way north, south, east, and west. I knew the way the breezes blew through those ancient causeways.
But a human body was something I never imagined stumbling upon. Perhaps I was foolish. I don’t know.
Still, in the middle of a running life, you sometimes discover death sitting peacefully, just around corners. Waiting for you.
It was the body of a girl.
Where I found her was a dead end, but this was unlike the other dead ends I had found. It wasn’t a collapse, it was simply a terminus. The tunnel widened slightly, like a little bulb-shaped room, and then it just abrupted—a round stone room.
I could tell it was a blind tunnel because I knew that the dust hung heavier in the air in caverns that had no outlet. I could feel the end of things in my lungs. I had stopped, leaning one hand against the cold stone and bending double to cough the dust out of me. That’s when the dim glow of my penlight fell on her.