“What do you have against light?” she said.
Dobbs opened his eyes, and the chair teetered beneath him. He caught his balance just in time.
The ice cream shop had vanished. He was back in the house, sitting at the table, a small pile of carrot tops in his lap.
Clementine stood in the doorway to the kitchen, sun blasting at her back, book bag slung over her shoulder. Dobbs hadn’t seen her in more than a month, since the run-in with her mother.
He closed his eyes again, but McGee was gone.
“You shouldn’t be here.”
Clementine let her book bag slip to the floor. “Afraid you’ll get me grounded again?”
He stood up, carrot tops spilling to the floor. “I was thinking more of myself.”
He walked over to the crate. He’d already eaten the more appealing things. Among the remains were some sort of bulbous purple root and something big and green and leafy that didn’t quite look like lettuce.
“I wanted to make sure you’re still alive.”
Dobbs rooted around until he found a cucumber, something that could at least be eaten raw. “Want any of this?”
Clementine lifted her bag. “Come on,” she said. “There’s someone I want you to meet.”
“Not this again.”
She came over and grabbed the cucumber and dropped it back into the crate. “Trust me.”
It was too easy to forget how young she was, like a tiny adult in cheerful clothing. He still couldn’t bring himself to disappoint her.
She didn’t run this time. There was no treasure hunt through the weeds and brambles. Instead, Clementine led him in a straight line across the field from his house.
Over the last several months, the lots had turned into meadows of wildflowers, tall green stalks wearing tiny lace caps. The foundations and even much of the trash had disappeared. The trees that had surprised him when he first arrived had swollen into pockets of plush green jungle. In the early spring he’d been able to go upstairs and see for miles, but now the view was everywhere interrupted by explosions of foliage and vines.
Evening was coming across the sky in streaks.
Clementine had come to a stop. “What do you think?”
They were standing beside a garden. The last time he’d followed her they’d passed this way. But since then everything had gone from brown to green.
At the far end of one of the garden rows, an elderly black woman was backing out of a tangle of little red balls, the tiniest tomatoes Dobbs had ever seen.
“May-May,” Clementine said.
The old woman tilted her head in their direction. Then May-May was ambling toward them in rubber boots and a long summer dress, a dubious expression on her face.
“Our neighbor,” Clementine said.
When the old woman brought her hands together, they sounded like sanding blocks. “Your grandpa told me.”
That was Dobbs’s cue. Digging his heel into the ground, he pivoted back in the direction from which they’d come.
Clementine grabbed his arm, holding him there. “He needs food.”
“Thanks,” Dobbs said. “But I’ve got everything I need.”
The old woman came forward, handing him a bucket. Inside, a head of lettuce poked out of a web of green beans.
“Come back if you need more.”
“I will,” he said, knowing there was zero chance he would.
§
His clothes that night came off like Band-Aids, sticky with sweat. He sat on the mildewed tile of the water and sewerage department locker room, a frigid rain falling on him from the showerhead.
Wake up, he told himself. Wake up. Think of the cold, the numb in your toes, the goose bumps prickling your arms.
Hunger is temporary. It’s all a test, to see what you’re made of.
He reached up to turn the handle, but the cold was already open as far as it would go.
He dried off with a fresh jumpsuit from the supply closet, leaving his own clothes soaking in the sink.
In the van he ate the last four green beans from the bucket.
§
He was leaning against a wooden pallet when she found him.
“Sleep well?” she said.
The sun was up, puddled in the arms of a sprawling oak at the edge of the lot.
Dobbs had a vague memory of a chase on top of a moving train, leaping from car to car. Who’d been doing the chasing, he wasn’t sure, but he was certain McGee had been there beside him, her clothes stained with someone else’s blood.
But the dream seemed far-fetched now, down here in the dirt.
The old woman leaned over him, wearing a smirk he recognized from her great-granddaughter. He remembered having arrived at the garden in the middle of the night, ravenous. But he didn’t remember what he’d picked, didn’t remember sitting down or anything else that followed.
The old woman squatted beside him, picking up the half-eaten green pepper that must have fallen from his hand.
“I don’t want to get Clementine in trouble,” he said.
“Is this all you’ve eaten since the beans?”
“I should’ve asked first.”
She lifted a plastic milk jug full of water, offered him a drink. “It’s a lot easier to see what you’re doing in the daylight.”
Easier for everyone else to see what you were doing, too.
§
That night he was in the van, driving to the warehouse. On a side street east of Warren, he saw her. McGee.
He recognized her tiny figure peeking out the front door of an old tenement building as he passed by. Hood pulled up over her head, despite the heat. Those bright anime eyes of hers scanning for something.
He stopped, slamming on the brakes. But by the time he’d turned the van around, she was gone.
He parked. He got out. There was no sign, inside the building, that she’d ever been there.
Back in the van, he changed direction, heading north instead. He remembered the way.
But the bookstore was closed. This time, for good. A sign in the window said OUT OF BUSINESS. Just those three words, no other explanation of where everyone had gone.
He drove to McGee and Myles’s apartment next, following the same route he’d once walked.
From the street, he couldn’t see anything. No lights. No movement. He climbed onto the roof of his van and from there onto the roof of the building next door. Beyond the bars on McGee and Myles’s windows, there was only emptiness, the place stripped bare.
§
Constance stood in her rubber boots, pouring water from her milk jug onto the globe of an eggplant.
“I thought they drank through the roots,” Dobbs said.
It was early for him, twilight casting shadowy stripes along the garden rows. But he’d decided to take her advice, to arrive before she went in for the night.
She came over and handed him something, a tool of some kind. Wooden handle, metal shank split like a serpent’s tongue.
“What’s it for?” he said.
She knelt down and gestured for him to do the same. She found a weed and lifted up the leaves, pinching them between her fingertips. And then she plunged the metal tool into the dirt below, like a dagger to the heart. The weed rose with a pop. She lifted it up for him, showing Dobbs the twisted, trunklike root and the branching hairlike veins. “If you don’t get it all,” she said, “it just grows back.”
“Got it.”
She slapped the tool into his palm and returned to her jug. She found another globe and poured. “You’ve got to make them work for it,” she said. “Put the water where they want it, they just get lazy.”