He didn’t dare call the police. If Mae managed to turn the situation around and the emphasis came down on his sneaking Sienna out of the house, he could end up in more trouble than he could get himself out of.

  Could he hire an attorney? He was an immigrant here and made only a dollar over minimum wage. Could he petition the court without an attorney? And what would his proof be that he was more fit than Mae? Mae had several arrests but nothing in the last thirteen months. She was the mom. She was the citizen.

  He had a few friends here in Hamilton, but not the kind he could go to for help. What could they do anyway? Help him hire a lawyer? Would he spend a thousand bucks and end up with nothing? He’d heard stories.

  Eventually he ruled out every option except one.

  Mom answered on the third ring.

  “Mark.” The tone was concerned and careful—it was almost midnight, after all, and they hadn’t talked for months—not since she’d told him to cut his losses and come back to Wyoming. “That woman’s going to string you along for the rest of your life, holding that child like a damn carrot in front of your nose. Give it up,” she’d said. But giving “it” up was giving Sienna up, and Mark couldn’t do that. But he couldn’t do this, either. Mom was tough and she was pissed about the choices he’d made, but she loved him fierce too, and at the end of the day, he didn’t have anyone else.

  “Hey, Mom.” He tried to control the quiver in his voice so that he wouldn’t come across as weak—she had no tolerance for tears. But he was weak. And he was sinking. He scrubbed a hand over his face in an attempt to get control of himself.

  “Mark?” The increased concern made his insides feel melty. “What’s going on?”

  Emotion rose up in his throat despite his attempts to bank it, stinging his nose and breaking him down even more. “Things are a mess up here. I don’t know what to do anymore.”

  33

  Sienna

  I dream about starfish and volcanos and cars weaving in and out of traffic. Tyson is chasing me in another car, and I’m looking for Grandma Dee, who wrote me a letter that told me she was sorry. I want to hear her say it, but I can’t find her and the sun is going down. I wake up shivering beneath the covers. At first I think it’s because of the dream, but then realize I must not have turned on the heat before I went to sleep. Canada was colder than Wyoming in April, and that is saying something, because it certainly wasn’t warm in Wyoming.

  I tell myself that my shoulder is feeling better, but I sit up slowly, holding my arm tight to my ribs. The digital clock next to the bed says it’s 7:08 p.m., and I stare at it, confused. I slept for six hours? I’m disappointed not to feel renewed energy and motivation, but there’s still time for me to see the house. In fact, maybe this time of day is perfect. Whoever owns the house now will likely be home in the evenings—will they let me walk through? All those times Grandma Dee talked about the timelessness of land and the stability of property, how energy and memory stay connected to places. Suddenly that has more impact.

  By the time I’ve used the bathroom and finger-combed my hair—I can’t manage a ponytail—I am breathing hard and feeling dizzy. I haven’t eaten anything other than those chips, but the idea of food makes me even dizzier. My arm aches and the rest of my body throbs in time with the pulse I can feel in my neck. I promise myself a solid meal after I see the house—there’s a burger joint on the corner. And then I’ll take another pain pill so that I’ll get a good night’s sleep. That’s all I need—food and rest. I’m tempted to take another pain pill now, but it won’t do any good for me to show up on a stranger’s doorstep slurring my words.

  I order an Uber and sit under a light on the metal steps of the motel while I wait, shivering and telling myself a dozen times to wait inside and talking myself out of it a dozen times because I’m cold only on the outside. Inside I’m too hot. It crosses my mind that I might have a fever—I’ll deal with that later too. I’ve decided not to wear the sling. I worry it will distract people, and it’s weird enough already for me to show up on a stranger’s porch. The car pulls up—a dark gray Hyundai—and I let myself into the backseat and hand over the paper where I’ve scribbled the address: 359 Ridley Way Drive. I’m glad I’m not driving—it’s nearly dark, and I’m too overwhelmed to find my way.

  The driver reads the address, then nods and puts the car into drive. “I know where it is.” His words are lilty and choppy at the same time. Middle East. Maybe he is a terrorist. Maybe he has five kids and works full time in a call center, then drives Uber in the evenings to pay for the kids’ dental work.

  I imagine myself telling Dad that I’m going to the house he was at the night Mom disappeared. See how much I know? I want to tell him. See what I learned on my own because I couldn’t come to you? My stomach burns with angry pain, and I shift to find a more comfortable position. I lean my head against the back of the seat and wish I would stop shivering. Instead, I fall asleep, waking up when the man staring at me in the rearview mirror asks if I’m all right.

  The car has come to a stop on a suburban street. I blink and look around as though I might recognize something that will orient me to where I am. Then I remember I’ve come to the house where Mom lived. Where Mom and I lived.

  “Miss?”

  “Yes, I’m fine.” I force a smile and reach automatically for the door with my right hand, sending a jolt of electric pain down my arm and side. I must have made a sound of some kind. Uber man turns in his seat so that he can look at me directly, his dark eyebrows pulled together in concern. He is wearing a Cubs hat and has a big, ugly mole the size of a nickel on the right side of his face.

  “You are ill?”

  “No, no, no, no, no, no.” I stop the repetitive answer and shake my head. “My arm is hurt, that’s all. I forgot.”

  He continues watching me as I reach across my body with my left hand and open the door. I swing my legs over the side of the seat and set my feet firmly on the ground before I stand, using the door to help me. I’m letting my nerves get the better of me. “Could you . . . stay?” I turn to look at him, suddenly afraid of doing this alone. What if the people don’t let me in? What if they aren’t home?

  “You could order me a second time,” he says, nodding toward the phone in my hand. “I drive around the block and come back.”

  It’s a reasonable solution, and I lean my left side against the open door while I order a ride through the app. He looks on his phone, confirming the pickup, I assume. Once he’s accepted the request, I put my full weight on my legs again, steadying myself with the car door. The drugs won’t shake off, but wouldn’t the pain be gone if that were the case?

  Focus.

  I shut the car door and watch my feet as I walk onto the curb and then the cracked cement of the sidewalk that leads to the house. I am halfway up the walk before I stop and look at the house. Squat. Square. Dingy red brick. With a metal roof and lights on inside. I look closely at things like the texture of the bricks and the railing on the porch, thinking maybe there’s an infant’s memory of this place hidden deep within me. No recognition comes forward, and I feel a tingle in my nose as disappointment tries to show itself in tears. I had hoped I’d remember something. I try to picture my mom playing with me in this front yard, but I don’t know the woman in the memory. I don’t know how to fit her in. The mother I’ve been told about all my life would have played with her toddler, but then that mother wouldn’t have left my father and done drugs and lived with a married man. I don’t know what kind of mother Maebelle Gérard was to me.

  The flower beds around the house haven’t been tended, for years maybe. The border made of bricks is uneven and missing a stone now and then like a set of bad teeth. There is a sagging chain-link fence surrounding the backyard, but the links have detached on one side, leaving a hole big enough for a Great Dane to fit through. Surely the house was in better shape twenty-three years ago, though. The mother I’ve been told about liked things neat and her favorite color was yellow—she wouldn’t like a house like this.

  Exhaustion and nausea seem to put their hands on my chest, holding me back and making me question why I have come to a crappy house in a dreary part of a city I do not know. The article said that Dad and Grandma Dee had picked me up for an overnight visit the night Maebelle Gérard disappeared. Dad had walked up this sidewalk. Stood on this porch.

  The Uber pulls away from the curb, and I start walking toward the front door again, unsure how long I’ve been stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. The shivering is a continual little hum inside me that makes me feel as if I am powered by a small motor. Like a robot. Doing what I have to do without thinking about the why.

  Who has seen the trembling?

  When the leaves hang wind?

  I reach into my jacket pocket to touch the Canadian twenty-dollar bill I plan to offer if I need to. “I lived here when I was a baby,” I say in my mind, preparing to say it out loud to the homeowner. “Could I just walk around? For nostalgia’s sake? You don’t need to tidy up or anything.” How weird is my request? Not too weird, I tell myself with conviction. I’d let someone walk around the ranch for twenty bucks. Grandma Dee wouldn’t. She’d tell them to get the hell off her property.

  There were three stairs leading up to the postage-stamp porch, with a wrought-iron railing on one side. If it had been on the left I’d have used the rail to help pull myself up the steps, but the railing is on my right and I have to keep that arm tight against my chest—it is absolutely screaming after the attempt to open the car door. I take the steps slow, matching the cadence to my breathing. One step. Two step. Three step.

  I hear the sound of a TV and smell . . . spaghetti? I ring the doorbell despite a spike of nerves. Twenty bucks, I remind myself. Do Canadians use the term bucks? I’d better say twenty dollars just in case. Do they hate Americans up here?

  The door is pulled open by a teenage girl who looks . . . familiar? Light brown hair. Narrow shoulders. Angst-ridden expression. This recognition freezes me for a moment and makes me wonder if I accidently did take another pain pill before I left the hotel. Or maybe she just looks like every teenage American girl I’ve ever met and I expected her to look different from them.

  “Hey,” the girl says, staring at me without a smile. Her hair is flat against her head, greasy near the part, and she’s got acne spattered along her forehead and chin.

  “Hi,” I say back. I feel the prickle of sweat along my hairline even though I’m still shivering from the cold. “Is your mom or dad here?”

  The girl looks at me another minute, then turns partway back to the house. “Mom!”

  I hear a grumbled response, but then the girl turns to stare at me while we wait for her mom, and I watch as her expression begins to make me think I’m familiar to her, too. Do I look like the quintessential American the same way she looks like the quintessential teenage girl? Before I can puzzle it out, the teenager is replaced in the doorway by a larger silhouette, momentarily backlit by the lights from inside the house until the woman—presumably the mom—steps forward. I meet the woman’s eyes, and something goes through me like lightning. The woman has light blue eyes with a thin black ring around the iris.

  “Yeah?” the woman says in a punchy voice. She pulls the sides of her long sweater closed over a grayed-out black T-shirt and multicolored leggings that cling to her lumpy thighs. No shoes. Teal chipped nail polish on her toes. Her hair is a reddish blond, the kind you end up with when you use a cheap color kit on dark hair. There is half an inch of gray along the woman’s part, and I doubt that lightning bolt I felt. She looks nothing like me except for those eyes that are uncomfortably similar to mine.

  The woman raises her penciled eyebrows. “Can I help you?”

  My thoughts have been shaken up like a box of Tic Tacs. Did I come to see this woman? No, I came to see the house. I have a Canadian twenty-dollar bill in my pocket. “Um, hi, my name is Sienna Chadwick. I, well, my mom lived here a long time ago, when I was a baby, and I . . .” This is weird. The woman is looking at me as if I’m a lunatic, and I’m not so sure she’s wrong. I can feel my heart racing. My head is hot, and the dizziness is getting worse. I force myself to look away from her eyes. “Can I see your house?”

  The woman’s face puckers, and she pulls her head back, making a double chin out of the chub of her neck. “See my house?”

  “Look around,” I say quickly, trying to remember that this sounded reasonable when I left the hotel. “I want to know if I might remember something. I—I know it sounds weird. I just . . .”

  The woman’s expression changes in an instant. The lines soften as her eyes become more fixed. “Who are you?” the woman says in a low tone. I can feel something poised behind the question like a cat.

  “Sienna. Sienna Chadwick.”

  “Your mom lived here? When?”

  “Um, about twenty-three years ago.” I don’t know how much more to say.

  The woman curses as though I’ve given the wrong answer. She takes a step backward into the house as though the physical strangeness I’m feeling might be contagious. “Get Grandpa,” the woman says to her daughter, who had been hanging back throughout the conversation.

  The teenage girl disappears.

  Grandpa?

  I blink at the woman, trying to make sense of her reaction until my eyes are drawn past her to the hallway with worn parquet flooring. I can see the threshold into another room with . . . green shag carpet like the carpet in that memory of me and Beck stacking cans when we were little. I look back at the woman in front of me. The memory is of Beck. But Beck had blue eyes in the memory. Same as me. Oh, my gosh!

  A man suddenly blocks my view of this woman with eyes like mine, standing in a house with carpet from a childhood memory that no longer makes sense to me. Or makes more sense. The man steps forward until he fills the doorway. He has huge shoulders, a bald head, and a hideous tattoo on his neck. I stare at the tattoo and wonder if the wings touch at the back of his neck, or if there’s a space there. I had wondered the same thing when I stared at a mugshot from more than twenty years ago when the lines of the tattoo were more crisp. They look blurry now, as though after finishing the artwork the artist brushed their hand over it, smearing the lines. I look up from the tattoo to meet his eyes and hear myself gasp as he stares me down, his gaze narrowed and searching, and then his face opening as though he’s solved something.

  “Tristin, get back to your dinner,” he says without looking at the woman. He crosses his big, muscular arms over his chest and smiles at me in a way that makes me want to back up. “Well, whaddya know, you look just like her.”

  A breeze spins around the house, pulling at my hair. “You know me?”

  “Sierra, right?”

  “Sienna.”

  “Oh yeah, that’s what he chose. She wanted Sierra.”

  He . . . Dad? She . . . Mom?

  I can’t remember what I’ve come here to ask—oh, yeah, to walk through the house. But that was because I thought the people living here would be strangers, maybe the second or third owners since Maebelle disappeared and was found in a river. My senses are popping, like wires shorting out. “You’re . . . David Vandersteen?”

  “Uh, yeah,” he says as though that’s obvious. Which it is. But still, I’m scrambling.

  “You knew my mom, Mable—Maebelle Chadwick?”

  “Chadwick?” He barks out the name, then sobers quickly, still staring at me in a way that makes me want to curl my shoulders in and try to hide. I resist taking a step backward in hopes that a few more inches could dilute this man’s intensity. The hum in my chest has turned to a thrum, a tribal beat that feels like a warning I cannot heed. “He told you she married him?”

  I nod, then shake my head. I know they didn’t marry—it just came out wrong. I look past him into the house, remembering why I’ve come. I’m not sure I want to go inside anymore, though. I look over my shoulder; the gray Hyundai is at the curb, which makes me feel better. I swallow and draw up my courage as I look back at Mr. Vandersteen. I can’t think of him as David, like we’re friends. I remember that I considered looking for him while I was in Canada; it just happened differently than I was ready for. “My mom lived here before she died—with you, right?”

  “When she died. I bet he didn’t tell you anything about that, either, did he?”

  I feel a snap in my head. “What?”

  “How’d you find me?”

  “An article, uh, from the night she died. This was where she’d been living before she disappeared.”

  “He didn’t tell you anything, then?”

  “He? My dad?”

  He stares at me, and something sharp and prickly begins turning in my stomach. Dad had told me that Mom died of breast cancer, not a drug overdose. Dad had told me that Mom’s name was Mable, not Maebelle. Gerrard not Gérard. Married. In love. Happy. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say.

  “I’ll bet you don’t.” He said the words in a slithery kind of way, part angry, part arrogant, part wanting to hurt me. Why? “When he always said he wanted to take care of her, I thought he meant something different, but I guess you never can tell, can you?” The smug smile was gone, and the briefest wave of sorrow struck his eyes. Blue eyes. Light blue, with dark rings around the irises. He leans toward me, and I pull back. This is the kind of man who lies—I can’t trust anything he says. Except Dad is apparently that kind of man too. A whooshing nausea upsets my balance when he speaks again, his voice low as though he’s telling a secret. “Funny thing about needles—you never can tell who pushes the plunger. Mae knew her limit and she didn’t waste a drop.”

  I feel as though my brain is blocking the information even as realization of what he’s saying rises like the sun over the eastern plain. I wish in this moment that I’d never left the ranch. He’s implying that . . . I can’t say the words even to myself.

  Popping lights at the edge of my vision herald the thrumming turning into a throbbing. I think back to one of a hundred memories of Dad drawing medicine of one kind or another into one of the thousands of syringes we use for the cattle on the ranch. I see the way he fluidly draws back the plunger, holds the needle to the sky, and flicks the shaft until the bubbles rise to the top so he can squeeze them out, sometimes spurting a drop or two of the serum in the process. Dad turns in this memory, holding the cow with one hand and using the other to drive in the tiny metal needle as smooth and as certain as an arrow cutting through water. A quick jolt on the cow’s part and that was that. The needle goes into the sharps container. Dad goes on to the next animal.