She dropped the newspaper and her keys on the kitchen counter and went to the freezer, took a deep breath, and opened the door to a hiss of mist. The compact plastic bag sat on the shelf, right where she’d left it. She reached in and touched the black plastic, but a wave of panic rose in her, and she yanked her arm back. She slammed the door shut.
Shaking, she sank into the recliner on the right—her father’s. She still thought of it as his, even though he’d been gone for eighteen years now. Since then, in the handful of times she’d seen him, usually when he dropped by unannounced at the holidays, Dani still couldn’t look at him in the face—which was her face, as everyone used to point out (Adam! She looks just like you!): dark hair, blue-gray eyes, pointy chin, although she’d gotten her mother’s straight nose instead of his hawklike one. A face she’d once loved beyond reason. Her funny, handsome Daddy who made her lunches and painted landscapes up in the attic and fixed up her car on weekends. Who gave her books and music as gifts and red-marked her Humanities papers but also made her take breaks and taught her to play card games—poker, pinochle, hearts—and easy sleight-of-hand magic tricks. The one who gave her a map and a pack of thumbtacks and said, “Mark it up, Dani. See the world. You can go anywhere you want. I want you to see as much as you can.” In those days before he left town, she couldn’t look him in the eyes. “Look at me, please, Dani,” he’d said, pleading. “Please let me explain,” but she couldn’t. She plugged her ears and kept her eyes focused to the right of his cheek, on his trimmed sideburn, at the yellow pencil behind his ear. She asked him not to visit her or to ever talk to her about it, and she never visited him. What was done was done. Now she ignored his calls but read his letters, which he sent every couple of weeks or so. In them he recounted his sad life at his cabin in Kachina Village. In each he tucked a check inside, which she cashed once a month and used for rent. Perhaps he saw this as some kind of penance; she didn’t ask. She didn’t write back. She didn’t say thank you.
She stood and went to the window that overlooked the backyard. The tall cottonwoods and shaggy cat claws and junipers no longer fit her memory. Obscuring the chain-link fence was a row of ocotillo Hugh had planted to keep the Captain from digging out. She looked at a spot near the left corner, where dry grass had attached itself in clumps to the lower diamonds of the chain link.
She walked down the hall to her old bedroom, which Hugh and her mother had turned into a room for the Captain: a dog bed, food and water, stuffed animals and squeak toys, a small TV they’d left on for him and which she’d shut off the day she found the Captain in the kitchen. She turned it on now. On the screen a blond teenage girl fought a vampire with a misshapen forehead. The girl stuck a stake through it, and it exploded into dust. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The young girl didn’t seem to break a sweat. Dani clicked it off. In the room, her little wood desk was gone, and so was the travel map with its sunny pushpins. Gone was the microscope where she would prick her finger and look at her blood, confounded by the serpentine clumps of cells, thinking then she’d work with blood as a doctor or scientist. Gone were the rickety vintage twin beds, an arm’s length apart, where she and Jess had once rolled around and kicked their bare feet and whispered secrets, where she had snuck Paul Overton in one spring afternoon when her parents were out and lost her virginity. Where she’d wake up in the middle of the night and see the empty bed across from her and wonder, Where’s Jess? before falling asleep, sure Jess was in the bathroom or getting a drink of water. Where she’d later vomited off the side into a trash can, an image of her father and Jess in her head, her mother screaming in the next room. Where she’d lain awake in the dark after all those police interviews in the weeks after Jess disappeared.
She crossed the hall into the bathroom. The cream tile, that same tile, glowed under the fluorescents. Modern taupe hand towels now, instead of pink, hung on the sink rack. She fiddled with the light switch, flipped it on and off. Dark, light, dark, light. Tiny, tiny, tiny sparks behind her eyes.
Dani had met Jess late in the spring of junior year, but Dani had seen her and knew who she was, of course. Jess at first had hung around Angie Juarez, riding around in Angie’s old red car, and the boys said, Oh, she’s a big lezbo, too, angry such a pretty girl hadn’t given them the time of day, and the girls said, She’s such a stuck-up bitch. But then Angie went back to being the quietest person in school, grease on her necklines and under her fingernails, and still Jess wanted nothing to do with any of them. Graffiti popped up on lockers: “Jess Winters spreads,” which wasn’t true in the malicious, salacious sense they intended, but the rumor—Jess Winters fucks her best friend’s daddy—didn’t come out until later, anyway.
Dani hadn’t cared about gossip. She’d barely noticed. Even when Jess started eating lunch in Ms. G’s classroom with her, she hadn’t paid much attention. At first it was because she was too busy being Dani Newell: studying, lost in a world of math and biology and pretests and scholarship applications, immune by then to the eye-rolls and snorts of her classmates. She shut them out; when she walked down the hall, clasping her books, she imagined herself behind protective glass, like the pope, except unlike the pope, she was mentally giving them all the finger. Professor’s Kid and Most Likely to Succeed—goddamn right. But then she started tutoring Paul Overton, who she knew wrote for the school paper and had broken all kinds of records in track and cross-country—not that she’d ever been to a track meet. He understood trig almost as well as she did, but his father had died, and he’d fallen behind. Within weeks, she was so in love with Paul and so busy having sex with him—in her twin bed after he snuck in through the window, or in her car’s back seat, or in his mother’s pecan orchards on a blanket right on the dirt—she hardly noticed anyone else. All she saw those days were Paul’s blue eyes and his black woolly hair; it was as if someone had replaced the lenses of her eyes. She clutched at those big ears of his like she might fall off a cliff if she let go. She didn’t know her body, let alone her heart, could feel like that—unearthly, like a flare in the corona of the sun.