Silence. She takes a long breath, slows her heart, changes her tactic. She walks backward instead of forward, falls silent herself, stays very still. Waits. Droplets kiss her skin. A small wind shivers the bushes and branches and there is the sound it makes and nothing else in this muffled world—no color, no bright spangling noise. This is what it is to vanish.
Doubtless the time she waits is much shorter than it feels, because how long can a small child bear to be alone in the woods, where his mother cannot find him? A burst of sound, and then he appears, running, running toward her, and she crouches down as he approaches so she can sweep him into her arms. “Mommy!” he says breathlessly. “You disappeared to me!”
“I know,” she says into his ear, squeezing his warm little body. “It was scary, wasn’t it?”
“The fog is jackass,” he says.
“You don’t like it anymore?”
“I wish it didn’t exist.”
“Maybe not if you stay with me, though. If you stay with me then you’re safe.”
“I want to go inside.”
“All right.” She starts to rise, but he clings to her, so she hoists him up and carries him in, heavy though he’s grown. “Milo,” she says into his ear at the doorway to their house. “What’s your name?”
“It’s Milo,” he says.
“What’s your last name?”
“Young.” He says it like she’s crazy, like there’s never been a doubt.
She doesn’t press. You can create a problem in the effort to discover if one exists. She doesn’t ask, So why did you say Carrasco? What else do you remember? What else? What else? Carrasco, Carrasco, Carrasco. There’s bad magic in that word. You shouldn’t speak it, not if you know what’s good for you.
So she doesn’t. She carries her son inside and makes them both hot chocolate, and they count out how many marshmallows they’re each allowed.
Has everything she’s done been for nothing?
Blood on My Hands
I was once a girl named Maggie Jean being driven on a truck next to a girl named Kay through the war zone of France. Soldiers trudged along the road on either side, and when they noticed us it was with a wonderment that girls of our average prettiness weren’t used to provoking. In the war, we were more beautiful than we had ever been, and everything that should have been beautiful was not. Some places the trees grew together over the road and you couldn’t see any place but exactly where you were, worse than being in a maze because you couldn’t even see the sky. Imagine being trapped in there with somebody shooting at you from the other side. A lovely green arch under a summer sky is a death trap. Topsy-turvy. When you’re in a war, everything is topsy-turvy. Men in blue overalls and berets are smoking at tables outside a café, even though the buildings on either side look like they’ve been punched in from the top by a giant. You put up a hospital in a cow pasture. At first it feels exciting and ridiculous, like you’re players in the world’s biggest game of make-believe. You’ve gone out in the backyard with your tent and your toy medical kits and now you’re busily pretending that sooner or later the patients will arrive.