I hid in that empty trailer house for what seemed like hours, waiting for the sun to peek out over the trees again but when I finally stepped outside it was still stalled red in the exact same place it had been earlier. The forest was gone and I followed a chalk road, waiting for the farmhouse to rise on my left, to hear the waves, to feel the breeze cutting across the snow. But suddenly I was walking through a desert, a sunburn already creeping up the back of my neck despite the setting sun. And I was still fighting it. Still waiting for that road to carry me home, somewhere that actually made sense.
Something shifted to my left and I paused. I examined the flat dusty terrain, still waiting for my eyes to adjust. Shapes were strewn along the path, darkness winding and clawing across the desert floor, the shadows of giant constellations in orbit. I shuddered and the heat suddenly felt alive. Everything felt alive.
The night seemed to flex and groan, sun finally sinking. I picked up my pace, glancing over my shoulder until I tripped over a loose stone. I hadn’t realized I’d been running. I hadn’t realized I’d been afraid. But as I rose to my knees, still staring into the darkness; feeling paralyzed, I realized that maybe I was. When I saw those shadows moving in the distance I realized that maybe I should be.
I was steeled to the ground, watching it inch towards me. It was thick and rolling and endless. It was reaching. For me. I tried to tell myself that it was some kind of wall cloud, a part of the landscape. I tried to tell myself to move.
Shit. Shit.
I stumbled onto my knees, ready to break into a run, trying to.
Move. Run.
The darkness closed in on me. I closed my eyes and when I opened them again I was sitting on the front porch of the farmhouse.
And I just kept sitting there. Afraid to move. Afraid to be moved. Because something had just shifted. Not just the trees or the desert or the ocean. But inside me. I could feel it. I thought of the shadows and I just tried to hold onto Bryn’s words. You don’t have to be afraid.
I waited for her to step outside but when she didn’t I let myself in again, that one step over the threshold drying the sweat from my clothes. I hoped maybe she’d be inside but it was empty.
She’d said time was strange here—like everything else—and I wondered how long she’d really been gone. How long it had been since I’d been gone too. Though, from where, I still wasn’t sure.
I hovered by the window for a while, staring into the dark. When it felt like it was staring back I closed the curtains and double-checked the locks, my sweaty palms gripping my pant legs as I searched for some kind of distraction.
I scanned the bookshelf, spotting that same gold scroll lining one of the spines. I expected it to be just another copy of Through The Looking-Glass but when I flipped it open I saw the same inscription. The pages even splayed the same in my palm, edges thin and tearing, brown glue unstuck from the binding. My hand trembled as I laid it back on the shelf, wondering if maybe it had been moved here by something else too. Something I had the slightest feeling wasn’t necessarily good. I tried to ignore it, thumbing through a few more books and then through the old western movies lining the middle row, dust clinging to the tips of my fingers. Nothing I’d ever read or remembered watching.
I reached for one of the strange metal sculptures, a robot holding a pitchfork, prongs dulled. I spotted another face, eyes fashioned out of the heads of screws, smile made out of the small spring you find in pens. Its chest was exposed, a coil welded within the frame like intestines.
The shelves were bowed under the weight of trinkets and old leather journals, VHS tapes and wooden boxes with velvet linings. The bottom shelf was stuffed with the cracked sleeves of old records and that’s when I noticed the old record player next to the shelf under the window.
The lid lifted with a crack, a vinyl copy of Tusk by Fleetwood Mac just waiting for the needle. I stared at the cover, waiting for something to click. When it didn’t, I lowered it, turning the player on. It coughed out that signature scratch and then the sound of a piano sifted out.
I let the record play, the melody just as foreign as everything else, while I examined the rest of the bookshelf. I spotted a small journal, paisley spine, a broken lock clanking against my hand as I pulled it free. Her full name, Bryn Reyes, was scrolled across the first page in juvenile cursive but as I flipped through I noticed the letters tightening, the slant more defined.
I watched the door waiting for her to walk inside. I peered through the windows, checking the beach but it was still empty. I sat on the couch, Bryn’s diary opened against my knees and then I started flipping through the pages.
Young, scribbling Bryn made Christmas lists and wrote about slumber parties at her cousin Dani’s house while swirling, cursive-writing Bryn wrote about waking up a week after Christmas Eve having slept through the entire thing and lying to her aunt about Dani staying the night at her house so her cousin could go out with a guy.
I tried to remember Christmas—making my own lists, waiting for sleep and Santa at the same time. But for some reason all I could drudge up were the smells. New things and old things. Plastic and crackling cedar. Did we even have a fireplace?
I kept flipping through paragraphs about Bryn’s first day of high school and her first date with some guy named Drew. He’d idled in his truck, her mom glaring at him from the doorway and then he’d taken Bryn to see a movie. She didn’t remember any of it. She was too busy trying to act normal, resting her hand within holding distance, waiting for him to reach for it. He didn’t.
I wondered if I’d ever felt that nervous, that uncomfortable in my own body and then I thought about washing up on the beach, scrambling for air on my hands and knees. I thought about the first time I saw my face, floating there in Bryn’s eyes.
I’d felt so disgustingly foreign like I’d been transplanted into this strange flesh that didn’t even belong to me. But could another person make you feel that way? Like jumping out of your skin, wanting to, just to escape the anticipation of their rejection. I tried to find a face, a pair of lips, eyes I could stare at for hours. Some girl I’d wanted to kiss, maybe had. Some girl who might have been waiting for me wherever it was that I’d come from.
I didn’t know if I’d ever been in love. I couldn’t remember. But in that second I wished I hadn’t. Because if I had and I couldn’t remember her, what would that mean? About people. About soul mates. It would mean that they’re not real. It might mean that nothing is. And I have to be real. I couldn’t just be some side effect of Bryn’s illness, some product of her imagination. I couldn’t. Could I?
Pages slipped past my fingers in a fury about Bryn’s uncle and her deadbeat dad and her widowed grandmother. Bryn’s grandfather had died of a stroke when she was fifteen. She’d slept in one of his old work shirts for three weeks and she’d cried every night for two. Two years earlier they’d lost Bryn’s uncle, Dani’s dad, and in the years since, still mourning those losses on half-hearted holidays and stolen birthdays, the rest of them had clung to each other.
And I couldn’t help but wonder what they were like—my family. Maybe my dad was tall like me. Maybe I had his nose or his chin. He could have been a doctor or a teacher or maybe he worked in the oil fields too. We’d watch football together on Sundays while my mom lay on the couch reading a book. She’d have hair the same color as mine, always thrown into a ponytail. Or maybe it was always loose, curled around her shoulders. Maybe I used to pull on it when I was a baby, tiny fingers gripping those soft strands until she winced and smiled.
They were high school sweethearts. Or maybe they’d met in college, both of them working off their student loan debt in some dive bar that was famous for their margaritas. But they didn’t drink. Well maybe my mom had a glass of wine on Sundays but that was it. And maybe my dad sipped on a beer during a game. Maybe he’d even let me sneak a taste once when my mom wasn’t looking. I’d wrinkled my nose, spit it out. He was glad.
He coached my youth football team. My mom bro
ught snacks. She showed up still in her slacks and blazer, high heels biting into the grass. She was project manager for some environmental firm. Or maybe she was an artist, old jeans covered in dried paint, a few drips at the edge of her hairline. My dad would clean it off with his thumbnail and then he’d kiss her. He’d kiss her and she’d kiss him back.
I was an only child, spoiled rotten. I had grandparents who came over on Saturday mornings and maybe I had cousins like Dani. Maybe they lived down the street and we ran barefoot down the sidewalk, a pack of adorable heathens with our late great grandmother’s thick eyebrows. She was an immigrant. From Italy. Maybe Spain. I stared down at my arms. They were dark, even my palms were a light russet color, the pigment hiding in my DNA and not from spending every summer day out in the sun.
Who are you?
I waited for the answer to finally hit me, for all of the daydreaming to weave itself into something real. I tried not to hold my breath but my lungs were tired of the silence, every inch of me tired of feeling empty. But the quiet lingered. My memory still lost. So I turned to the next page in Bryn’s diary, sifting through her past while trying to snuff out the ache for my own.
Chapter 13
Bryn