“We want to come,” Benji and Claudia said in unison.
“What if it sucks?” the boy said miserably.
“Since when has anything you’ve done sucked?” Benji asked.
“Benji,” said Max warningly. He slouched deeper into his chair and attacked his piercing with renewed vigor.
“Are you okay?” Claudia asked. Uncertain whether the ground before her was allied or enemy land, she moved as if she might at any minute snag a tripwire.
“I’m fine.”
“Because you seem—”
“What?”
“Not yourself.”
“Who do I seem like?”
Claudia took a breath and tried again. “You seem — bothered.”
“Bothered?”
“Bothered.”
“Don’t give me a hard time.”
“I’m not.”
“You sound like Navi.”
“Well, Navi cares about you. So do I.”
No response.
Benji extended a hand to rub Max’s back. The boy bristled but bore it. “You don’t get to sweep onto the scene,” he announced hotly, looking not at Claudia but past her, to the immaculate shelves of oversized architecture books, the wall-sized corkboard on which she kept a rotating gallery of interests and inspiration, “and tell me I’m crazy.”
“I didn’t say crazy,” Claudia answered. “Do you hear me? I care.”
“We all do,” Benji echoed. “And you know it.”
Max relented with a sigh. He brushed a hand through the thick fall of his hair and apologized.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Claudia asked.
“You mean am I taking my meds?”
Claudia, suddenly surrounded by tripwires, stopped.
“It’s okay. It’s what everybody means when they ask if I’m okay.” He laughed. “Did Navi call you?”
“No.”
“Because that’s, like, his favorite song.” He strummed an electric air guitar and briefly rocked out. “Are you takin’ your meds? Are you takin’ your meds?”
“Are you?”
“That’s the whole problem. It’s why the second act is such a pile of — I can’t think right. I can’t write right. It’s like I’m walking around with a fishbowl over my head. I can’t hear the way any of it is supposed to sound.”
“You feel that way now,” Claudia ventured.
“I feel like that all the time. It’s like I’m betraying my work so I can sleep at night. I’m twenty-two. What do I need to sleep for?”
“You feel like you’re betraying your work, but you’re doing the best thing for it. You’re protecting—”
“I got it,” Max broke in. “Arnav is a broken record with that shit. No offense.”
Claudia smiled.
“Anyway, it doesn’t feel like I’m protecting it.”
Knowing how hollow any comfort she might speak would sound, she held out her hand to him. It waited in the air, waited the long minute while Max decided whether to take it. Lowering his eyes to his lap, he reached for Claudia’s hand and squeezed it.
“Honeybear,” she said.
~ ~ ~
Jane? Yes. Marry me. I’ll never marry you. Why not? I’ll never marry anyone. Never is a very long time. What do you want to get married for anyway? To dominate and oppress you, naturally. Forever? Forever. Forever is a very long time, but since you put it that way, fine, yes, I’ll marry you. Say it then. I just did. Say it again. Is this the beginning of my oppression? Say when, when will you marry me? Tomorrow. You always say tomorrow. And I mean it, but then we wake up, and tomorrow’s always today. There are words for girls like you. It’s true, and I’ll bet you know every one.
13
It rose before her eyes like a city bearing her name. A vibrant, bustling hub stood at the center, the dense central ring of pedestrian-friendly shops, the drugstore, two restaurants, a community center, a nondenominational meeting house, a playground and swimming pool and gymnasium, from which lines of row houses — livably but not intimidatingly modern — extended outward like the spokes of a wheel. Alluvia had never seen the likes. Claudia imagined the streets humming and alive, neighbors strolling at dusk under the soft lamplight, gathering for concerts on the distant green. The dream cradled her for a moment, shielding her from the angry summer sun, from the irritants of the real bustling crowd building up around her, before the screech of a hot mike grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her hard. She came to in the middle of the desolate field. A thick of dark, bark-stripped trees standing where the village center one day would. A pond in place of her pool. She slapped a mosquito about to land on her neck.
The field at Compton’s Mound, surrounded by slumbering backhoes and bulldozers, remained (for the moment) untouched. Nick might have set their heavy jaws in motion long ago, but Goliath of area business though he was, the slightest breeze of negative publicity threatened to topple him faster than David’s slingshot. The only indication of the changes to come were the dozen large-scale renderings that stood on easels lining the front of the modest stage. Claudia stood before one of them, holding out her smartphone for a photo she’d been too distracted to snap. She hit the shutter and, with a few efficient stabs at the smooth glass screen, sped the image off to Max. Wish you were here. Cat stood a few feet away.
“Thank you,” she said.
“For what?”
“For leaving the cemetery where it is.”
Cat, who, to Claudia and Nick’s great relief, had surrendered her incendiary Save Compton’s Mound T-shirt in order to cross enemy lines and participate in the groundbreaking ceremony, lifted her sunglasses to study a rendering of the cemetery. Its shattered graves, enclosed by a refurbished iron fence, gathered around a new marble obelisk, carved with the names of the ancient veterans whose commemoration Cat and her not-always-merry band of protesters had fought so hard to secure.
“I’m glad you’re saying a few words,” Claudia responded.
“I’m not sure how I feel about the pet cemetery.” She looped her arm through Claudia’s — lightly, briefly; it was too hot for skin-to-skin — and strolled along to the next set of posters. “But I’ll keep that to myself. It’s the idea of sharing space with the neighbor’s corgi. It doesn’t exactly say sacred ground.”
There’s no such thing, Claudia thought. By this time, after all the spinning the earth had done, there were bones under every last boot sole. The only option for building, for walking, for moving on was to do so on top of them.
“Nick thought the owners might be less creeped out. You know, by the dead in their backyards.”
“Compromise.”
“Compromise.”
Claudia’s decision to leave the scraggly little gravesites more or less alone had as much to do with Nick’s directives as it did with her budding affection for Benji’s future wife. If he asked her, that is. If she said yes. But these things, to Claudia, seemed as inevitable as Benji putting his ducks in a row and asking his sister for help buying the ring.
A month ago, Cat and her sister, Molly, made their annual pilgrimage to the Iowan field where, twenty-four years earlier, American Flight 782 crashed to the ground. There was no finely etched slab to memorialize their parents’ names. A couple who, like the 182 others who died that day, had no claim on the land, no say in whether nature would be allowed to erase so completely the tragic end of their tale. In time, the scarred earth did exactly that, reverting back to a lush, silky green sea of corn. If it weren’t for the kindness of a sympathetic farmer, who set a giant white boulder in the nearby clearing behind his barn, the site would have gone completely unmarked. No place for the mourners to go. Nowhere to point to and say, There. It happened there.