“Where am I going?” Tomsen asks the rear view mirror. “Should I just drive down random streets until we run over the children? That will take a long time. Guidance welcome.”
No one offers any. A hush hangs over us as we tour this haunted city. Julie is looking at Nora like she wants to ask her something, but Nora is far away, staring through the windshield with blank, round eyes that don’t track the passing scenery. Their only movement is a barely perceptible twitching.
“14th,” she blurts suddenly. Her voice is distant, like she’s transcribing a dream. “North on 14th. Ten blocks. Then right on U Street.”
Tomsen takes the cue without question. We head north on 14th.
M sits on the edge of the couch, watching Nora. She never looks back, so he watches the back of her head, looking into her cloud of curls as if searching for a ticking bomb. I’ve seen him weather countless mortal dangers with a stoic grimace. I’ve never seen real fear on his face. It frightens me.
WE
NORA GREENE has a strange way of reading.
We find her crouched in a dim aisle of the Library, books scattered at her feet. She picks one up, skims it, drops it, grabs another, throws it aside. Then she’s in another room, another hall, up on the ladder, down in the basement. She appears to be looking for something, but in fact she’s looking for nothing. She avoids fiction, music, poetry, art. She looks for magazines, textbooks, history, science. Things that will chat with her through the door without asking to come in.
But the uninvited guest keeps sneaking inside. She opens a volume of economic statistics and finds a feature about a family’s escape from a burning city. She flips through a book on human anatomy and finds a chapter titled “The Big Man.” She opens a travel magazine and finds a photo of a girl and a boy with a caption that says:
Find us.
Her scream echoes through endless halls, scribbling grief into the margins of every book.
“Nora,” Marcus says. “Can I ask you something?”
Blackened houses drift past like sinister temples. The fires traveled well in Little Ethiopia. Some buildings are reduced to mounds of charcoal, others are merely scorched, but no part of the neighborhood escaped untouched. Nora hears sirens. Helicopters. Police and firefighters drowned out by a voice booming over loudspeakers, warning her of what’s coming, urging her to accept it, let go, surrender to the peace of God’s plan. And a woman—a white woman with Nora’s brows, Nora’s jaw, Nora’s long legs—running through the streets shouting, Amen! Amen! Lord take us home!
“Nora?”
“What.” It comes out with difficulty. A feeling of choking.
“Your family…you said you didn’t have one. What’d you mean?”
She doesn’t answer. She watches the buildings get sootier as the RV approaches U Street and she hears a voice somewhere in the distance. Not the woman’s. A boy’s voice. Small and high and too far away to understand. But she knows it’s calling her.
“Where did you grow up?” Marcus asks. His tone is strangely insistent, and Nora feels anger coiling in her.
“Why?” she says with the bluntness of a crowbar. She sees the melted sign of Dukem Restaurant, where her parents first met. She sees the blasted entryway of the habesha grocery where her father used to work. She sees the pile of ash that was the community center where she spent so much of her childhood. “Here,” she says without looking at him. “I grew up here.”
She feels something pushing at the side of her vision, like a reel of film trying to overlap the one currently playing. She fights it. She feels Julie’s eyes on her, watching with mounting concern, and she opens her mouth for a joke or lighthearted quip to make everyone comfortable again, but she finds herself utterly empty of these things. She takes a deep breath and closes her eyes—a shadow reaches toward her—she opens them wide and begins to breathe hard.
“Nora?” Julie says.
The voice is closer. She can almost discern the words.
“ I didn’t really have a hometown,” Marcus says at a weirdly high volume, like he’s forcing a panicked shout into the tone of casual chit chat. “Dad was Navy. Moved every year, so not much chance to make friends. Just me and my brothers, town after town. Did you…” His voice cracks. He sounds terrified. “Did you have any siblings, Nora?”
R puts a hand on his shoulder and shakes his head, don’t. That strange, lanky ghoul and his gigantic friend. Tall man. Big man. Two corpses walking and talking, lives and deaths and new lives. Time doesn’t flow; it’s a solid mass. It’s here all at once, tripping over itself.
“Did you have a brother?” Marcus pleads, and R pulls him back, muttering admonitions.
But Nora doesn’t register the questions. She is listening to someone else. A voice that’s loud now but still unintelligible, like a scrambled radio signal. She is watching a burnt building grow nearer and she’s shrinking back against her seat. It looms ahead like a monster in a dream; she tries to run away but she can’t turn around; she floats forward, locked on a track.
She is standing in the dead grass outside the burnt building, staring up at its crumbled plaster frame, its bright green paint peeled and scorched, its windows empty and black. She hears people talking behind her, questions and warnings and urgent entreaties, but she doesn’t know these people. They are from a distant, unimaginable future, and a voice from right now is calling her.
She steps through the doorway of the apartment where she lives. Her boots crunch on the charred wood staircase and a few steps crack under her, but she ascends. She passes the doors of the neighbors she’s never met, a community of hunched shoulders disappearing around corners. She passes the window where she practices her aim, shooting BBs at birds in the birch across the street, hating her accuracy when they fall to the ground but telling herself it’s necessary, because sooner or later her parents will fail her, and she’ll have to take care of herself.
No. Not just herself.
She hears the voice, very close now, just behind the last door. She doesn’t want to go in. Her heart is pounding and she can’t catch her breath, but the door is open. She smells frankincense and coffee. The voice is sad and alone. It’s been waiting for her.
She steps into her family’s apartment.
There is a void sitting on the sofa.
She feels everything in her trying to run away, and yet she doesn’t run away. She wonders how this can be. If everything in her says run, what is left to say otherwise?
We are learning how to speak.
We can’t shout, but we can whisper. We can’t push, but we can nudge. We can slip truths between pages until finally she reads them.
Nora stands in front of the void and croaks a name.
“Addis?”
Her brother looks up at her. Her brother is here, sitting on the sofa.
Nora sways on her feet. Her vision blurs in and out. How? After all these years, how? It can’t be real. He can’t be here.
“Addis?” She stumbles closer. She reaches toward him. “Are you…”
She touches his cheek. His skin is cool, but he’s here. His eyes are strange, but he’s here.
“Addis, it’s me, it’s—”
It’s hard for her to speak. Her throat is full of warm water. “It’s Nora, your sister, do you…?”
She sees a distance in his gaze, not quite recognition. But he’s here. The hole in his shoulder that started this, the bite just above that finished it—both wounds are dry, and there is fresh blood smeared on his mouth, and Nora knows what all of that means. But he’s here. Perhaps not Living, but not gone. His yellow eyes regard her with curiosity…and something else. Some distant tremor of feeling.