After graduation, he had no more updates on her. She paged forward, looking at the blue ink. Everyone had updates within the last year, everyone except for Denny, everyone who was still alive; the ones who weren’t had death dates. Everyone except her. She tried to imagine what from her adult life she would have added, given the chance, or what an internet search on her name would provide, or what her parents would tell someone who asked what she was doing. Surely there was something. Parents were supposed to be your built-in hype machines.
She pulled out her phone to call Marco, but the battery was dead. Just as well, since she was suddenly afraid to try talking to anyone at all. She returned to the notebook and flipped toward the back. U for Uncle Bob.
Once upon a time, there was a boy whose family planted him in a hillside, so that he took over the entire hillside, like a weed. They dug me out of the hillside on my thirteenth birthday. It’s good to divide rhizomes to give them room to grow.
This story was long, eight full pages in tiny script, with episode dates interspersed. At the end, in red ink, this address. She pictured Denny driving out here, exploring the cottage, looking up at the hill. If she ever talked to Marco again, she’d tell him that what he’d found in Denny’s closet wasn’t a shrine; it was Denny’s attempt to conjure answers to something unanswerable.
She put the notebook back in her purse and kept walking. Three quarters of the way up the hill she came to a large patch where the grass had been churned up. She put her hand in the soil and it felt like the soil grasped her hand back.
Her parents said she didn’t visit often enough, but now she couldn’t remember ever having visited them before, or them visiting her. She couldn’t remember if she’d ever left this town at all. She lived in Chicago, or did she? She’d told Marco as much, told him other things she knew not to be true, but what was true, then? What did she do for a living? If she left this hill and went to the airport, would she even have a reservation? If she caught her plane, would she find she had anything or anyone there at all? Where was there? She pulled her hand free and put it to her mouth: The soil tasted familiar.
“I walked down to the cottage that would be mine someday”—that felt nice, even if she wasn’t sure she believed it—“and then past the cottage, through the town, and into my parents’ house. They believed me when I said where I’d been. They fit me into their lives and only occasionally looked at me like they didn’t quite know how I’d gotten there.” That felt good. True. She sat in the dirt and leaned back on her hands, and felt the hill pressing back on them.
She could still leave: walk back to her rental car, drive to the airport, take the plane to the place where she surely had a career, a life, even if she couldn’t quite recall it. She thought that until she looked back at where the rental car should have been and realized it wasn’t there. She had no shoes on, and her feet were black with dirt, pebbled, scratched. She dug them into the soil, rooting with her toes.
How had Denny broken his story? He’d refused it. Whether his life was better or worse for it remained a different question. To break her story, she’d have to walk back down the hill and reconstruct herself the right way round. She thought of the cuckoo girl, the lost girl, the cuckoo girl, so many stories to keep straight.
The soil reached her forearms now, her calves. The top layer was sun-warmed, and underneath, a busy cool stillness made up of millions of insects, of the roots of the grass, of the rhizomes of the boy who had called this hillside home before she had. She’d walk back to town when she was ready, someday, maybe, but she was in no hurry. She’d heard worse stories than hers, and anyway, if she didn’t like it she’d make a new one, a better one, a true one.
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