It’s as good as always, so tender it falls apart like paper in the rain. Lil pops a pickle in her mouth. “We weren’t drunk. We didn’t imagine it. I know that much.”

  Jason scoffs, tossing a sand-blasted rib bone onto his plate. “That fire,” he murmurs. “I’ve only ever seen a fire like that in my dreams. I thought it’d eat us all alive.”

  “Have you ever seen one vanish into thin air?” She tosses one on his plate too.

  He doesn’t answer right away, long enough for her to look up at him. Even in bright noon light, his eyes are very dark, no sun catching there. “Why do you hold on so tight to this place?” he asks, voice a smoke-broken rasp.

  Lil balls a napkin in between her hands. “Jason. You know.” The midday light, golden syrup gilding the trees. Mom humming as she cracked pecans on the porch, Sasha complaining that her fingers are cramping. Thunderstorms that shiver down Lil’s spine. The night in the pond, Jason’s fingers digging into the soil behind her, learning to move together that first time. “Don’t you?” Lil shrugs helplessly. “You know how special it is here. You know I can’t just leave this place.”

  Jason is the only person outside the family who has seen the pond in Lil’s lifetime, if not the golden pecans. Still, he’s seen more of her than even Sasha, maybe. She chose the Clearwater orchard over him. He is quiet, reading her face. Then he nods swiftly. “Then I think I need to show you something.”

  “What?” Lil asks, but he’s already standing, leaving the bones of their lunch, and offering her his hand. “Fine.” She pushes herself up. “Let’s go.”

  ***

  They jump into Lil’s pickup, and she turns to him with a raised eyebrow. “We’re going up to the old cemetery,” Jason instructs, hair blowing back from his face as they turn out. “Park in the ferry lot.”

  Situated at the top of the ridge, on a long bluff overlooking both the town and the river, the town’s tiny necropolis could never have been a good idea. It’s a logistic nightmare, only a narrow one-lane road, the ground too rocky for easy below-ground burials. No, the early Methodists must’ve known it wasn’t the best place for a cemetery, but they’d done it for the glory, so that the dead here would be up high, expectant, among the first to rise on Judgment Day. Jason and Lil park and take the long winding stairs up the ridge. Soon their hike turns—in fits and starts—into a race.

  “There’s a reason the Finches have always been buried in the western churchyard,” Jason pants, hooking a switchback in the stairs to pass her. “This is so damn…inconvenient up here.”

  “I think it’s a nice run.” She jogs forward, looping around him and bounding up the next few steps. “Relaxing,” she taunts over her shoulder. They careen up the path neck and neck, Jason a glint of gold in her periphery, until the gates are visible at the top of the ridge.

  Unlike the sparsely shaded stones of the newer cemetery, this place is cramped with graves, mausolea, and stacked burials huddled together beneath old withering trees. Kudzu twists over the gates and slinks across the ground. Jason steps carefully across a dense green tangle straying into the path, leading the way between the silent stone structures. They are watched on all sides by stone monuments.

  “I went on a jog this morning and found myself up here,” Jason explains. “I guess I just wanted to see the whole town.”

  “It’s a beautiful view.” Clearwaters historically have made their final homes here, in some dark corner. Mom used to take them to visit occasionally; Lil has a stark memory of a little boy’s grave, some distant relative who died by drowning. The oldest of the graves are long since cracked and devoured. “But what do you want me to see?”

  The twisted shadows of bare branches fall across Jason’s back, pass like ghostly antlers over his head, and she pauses on the path, the scent of dead leaves caught in her lungs. For a blink between shade and light, he doesn’t look quite right, too thin, too quick, too—something. “Jason?” she calls.

  “Come here. Look.”

  They sit on the low stone wall. Below them is the town. The river gleams away over her shoulder, Sasha somewhere down there humming some tuneless river song. Right under them, there’s the central square, the courthouse, and the stately columns of Town Hall, where everybody’s favorite ineffectual, semicrooked mayor, Marshall Braxton, is no doubt indulging in his after-lunch nap at his desk. Nearby is Su’s grocery, First Methodist, and the park. Down Main Street, Autumn’s bakery sits at the corner across from the closed-down five-and-dime and Wade’s ancient shoe store, whose display hasn’t changed in about twenty-five years. Wade wasn’t at Russ’s funeral, was he?

  The town has a single stoplight. Off that intersection are their elementary school and the old neighborhoods, where most houses have at least one pecan tree in their front yards, and those with larger backyards have a few more tucked away. That’s also the way to the new high school—new, because it replaced an older one around 1928—its football field ever verdant, bounded by bleachers. Players scrimmage on the field, sunlight glinting off their helmets. And beyond the school are fields and the long curving boundary of the ridge.

  But the other way, through the stoplight, is west, where the six blocks of real town give way to pecan trees on every side. The railroad to the south snakes closer to the highway, as if it’s squeezing the old orchards. And the kudzu, lurid and clutching, is creeping in, running up trees and down hills, over houses and into wells, turning the world into walls and carpet of unbroken acid green. Up here, Lil can see its boundary point, and it catches her breath how much closer it’s gotten: the Finch orchard is the last line of defense, now that the Winstons and, in their wake, the Coopers, packed it in. It’s too far to really make out, but she knows those trees out there, now lumpy with scab. Left untended, their roots don’t have enough zinc to send upward. They get rosette. The leaves darken, turn spotty. The husks crack.

  She squints past all that, at the anonymous empty places where the kudzu has taken hold. Any people who might still be out there, miles out, don’t come to town. It’s always fire season there, where the ground is so parched it begs for a lit match.

  Then there’s the old WPA bridge, cracked in two and half sunk when the highway was destroyed in that storm. The repairs are ongoing, subject to endless delays, either funding issues from Town Hall, or weather, or men quitting at the site. But they’re working today; Lil can hear the distant call of voices, the occasional industrial clang. Any day now, they’ll finish laying the new road and the town will take its first deep breath in who knows how long.

  Any day now.

  Her entire life is below her, everything and everyone. It looks like one of Lou’s model train set up here on the ridge, watched over by the quiet dead.

  “What did you want to show me?” Lil asks again, catching Jason’s eye. He’s been watching her. “What?”

  “Look at the library,” he murmurs.

  The town’s library is just off the central square. It is a repurposed old house, a squat off-white building with the pillared porch that faces the courthouse. At first, it’s hard to make out what Jason is talking about. But in that bright noon light, there is some gentle shimmer around it. A shimmer, and above, a darkening billow of smoke.

  The library is on fire. Before her eyes, a char runs up the back, flames busting through windows. Lil lunges instinctively forward, but Jason puts a hand out to anchor her. There’s a palpable rumble as the roof shifts, like at any moment the whole thing might cave in. She can’t see them, but the books inside must be peeling apart, the air noxious with melting glue, running ink, curling and blackened pages.

  “Why isn’t anyone doing anything?” she growls at him. A breeze carries over the chemical smell of smoldering insulation, and with it she can feel the heat of that fire creep over the back of her neck.

  But Jason just shakes his head. “Look again.”

  Her fury rises, but Lil looks.

  The fire is gone.

  Desperately, she glares at Jason again. He’s still holding her hand, tight as a vise against his knee. “This morning, it was the same house fire we fought last night, blinking in and out like a light.”

  “What—how could—I don’t…” Fires that vanish one minute, consume the next. She scans the town again. Empty football fields. Quiet streets. The light is off at Autumn’s bakery. The library looks perfectly safe again. This is hardly the first time this land has shown her sights that defy her senses. But the pond and the tree are known to her. This? She’s never seen this in her town before. She doesn’t know what it means.

  “What do you think?” Jason asks, still watching her. He’s so…calm. Why isn’t he bothered by what he’s shown her up here? Denial?

  “I don’t know.” Behind them, the trees sigh and release a shudder of leaves, the wind pushing them against their ankles. “But I’m going to find out.”

  Act II

  Chapter Nine

  Autumn was stoned at an outdoor music festival when she had her epiphany. Some muzzy melody strung along in the background, an indie band she didn’t know who mixed accordions with electronics. Autumn floated, half-shut eyes falling on a girl in the crowd with a pierced navel and toffee hair, raising a clunky camera to capture the band.

  Matt hissed, poking at the micro-wrinkles under his eye. “I swear they’re getting worse. Tell me honestly, can you see them?”

  “Not really.” She stretched her arms in the cool and pleasantly waxy strands of grass. Clouds plodded across a blue New Mexico sky. Onstage, an accordion wheezed.

  “Your skin is amazing,” he said, his gentle hand, slender fingers, one turquoise nail, carding through her swampy bangs, looking for frown lines. It was so hot that day, humid from the bodies of a hundred sweaty music fans. “You promise you’d tell me if these wrinkles were noticeable?”

  “Promise.”

  For all the ways being high softened the edges of the world, like Vaseline smeared around a camera lens, it also brought her such clarity. Because lying on that grass, while Matt complained about aging and their friends moving to the suburbs, Autumn remembered her hometown for the first time in ages.

  She’s been busy. Culinary school. Work. Life. Mom and Dad moved away. She hadn’t had anyone to call, any friends left to visit.

  But in that instant, the feeling of home returned, fresh and new. The flowers Mom grew on the borders of their small brick house. The family library of albums, something perpetually spinning on the record player. Dad fussing over a babka. Sasha’s eyes, very close, which whispered a sleepover confession that often played through her mind, the last words she’d hear before closing her eyes: You’re the only one who really knows me, Pip.

  The only one.

  When Autumn heard that old echo, her comeback was always a swift and bitter bite: If that’s true, where the hell did you go?

  Autumn hovered, her body strung as tight as a guitar string. The beginning of a suspicion stirred in the back of her mind.

  A question she did not want to ask, much less answer.

  How long had it been…?

  ***

  The day after the house-fire-that-wasn’t, Autumn rises, groggy with lack of sleep, and stumbles her way downstairs to her old bakery. She never gave up the prime Main Street location. Now, as she turns on the oven, she’s grateful.

  Autumn spent years honing her skills in the bakery before striking out to try her luck outside of the support of parents and loyal grandmothers coming every Saturday morning for her challah bread. So she knows the world from behind her counter. What Cork liked to order with his coffee, and what nuts Cynthia liked in brownies and abhorred in cookies. Who couldn’t resist a cinnamon roll and who could only be swayed by old-fashioned apple turnovers.

  She knows where everything goes. The two red patio tables she kept folded up in the alley with matching chairs. That old cash register that had to be smacked in just the right place to fully pop open. Even her emergency handle of bourbon kept in the drawer under that cash register. It’s all miraculously as she left it. Only a little dust.

  Most people might have sold the bakery. Autumn rented it out rather than sell, but she hasn’t had a renter in a while. And by the look of their little town, she isn’t sure she’ll get another anytime soon.

  As the oven heats, she forms a dough. It’ll be focaccia today. Focaccia is her thinking bread. Any stress, problems, questions, crushes—they are all baked into sweetly spongy bread with olives and mozzarella, finished with garlic and herbs and indecent amounts of olive oil. It was Dad’s thinking bread too. He taught her the recipe at six, using her fingers to press divots into the dough. Mom, without fail, hung on his shoulders whenever he pulled a batch out of the oven, teasing until he let her and Autumn pull off crusts that breathed steam.

  By the time she’s sliding the first loaf into the oven, she is more alert. But the night before doesn’t make any more sense. She’s feeling it again. The same seed of suspicion that drove her here, the heaviness of a question that she does not want to ask. Only—

  Only what was that question? It’s as if she can’t hold it in her head. She’s all jumbled. She’s been thrown off since she got back.

  Now, maybe it’s been replaced altogether with: How can a fire snap at her fingers one moment, and the next, be gone?

  Autumn stops. She presses the heels of her hands against the cool steel counter. Sasha hasn’t called.

  Despite having so much time pass without Sasha in her life, Autumn is reattuned already, and it’s weird that they haven’t talked about what happened. Not that she knows what to say.

  While her loaf bakes, Autumn steps out the back door into the alley where her dumpster sits empty and her trusty metal patio furniture has been waiting all this time.

  The alley gives way almost immediately to a wide greenbelt where the weeds stretch tall, leading to trees. The openness of the space used to let her breathe. Sometimes she’d hear teenagers, or find broken bottles if she wandered there. Not today though. It’s an early hour, and the world is beginning to awaken. The best part of being a baker is that she rarely misses the glory of a sunrise in full bloom. It’s happening now, lifting the gauze of the early morning. There’s nothing like sunrise to banish the nighttime thoughts that creep in under windowsills to whisper all her despairs in her ear.

  In the grass, near the seam of the tree line, something flashes by.

  Autumn pushes off the building. She ventures nearer—but the ghost of smoke, of batting at illusory flames hooks in the back of her mind. Once, she would run around these woods like a stray, finding her own playmates, without fear. Now, she doesn’t remember how it feels to be so fearless.

  She takes a step—a branch cracks under her foot and a figure in the grass rockets up.

  It’s a child. He’s small, can’t be older than five at his size, his slenderness. Like a little forest creature with a mop of shaggy hair. Could he be a child who lives out beyond the tracks, some family still scrounging out there? Aren’t his parents looking for him?

  “Hi,” she murmurs.

  He sniffs the air. The aroma of baking bread has followed her outside.

  “I’m Autumn,” she calls as gently as she can across the distance. Someone needs to care for his clothes; she can spot a tear in his faded shirt collar. Red-brown eyes watch Autumn. “I’ve got bread,” she tries. “Would you like some? There’s plenty—”

  And just like that, he takes off, sprinting into the woods, nothing but the soles of his shoes flashing at her.

  “Wait!” Autumn calls, but he’s already gone.

  For a long time, she stays, watching, as sunlight illuminates the trees. But he doesn’t return. Nothing moves out there. She can’t understand the feeling that stirs in her, that this child is in need. Her heart pulls toward the fallow fields, and she thinks of the skinned squirrel. It may not be as safe out there as she remembers.

  Autumn returns to the bakery, pulling her bread out of the oven not a moment too soon.

  If she leaves it wrapped in cheesecloth on one of the red tables in the back alley, no one else has to know.

  ***

  The uneasiness of the night before lingers all through the day, clinging to Sasha’s clothes like the smell of smoke. The ferry runs four times: there and back, there and back. Her shoulders itch, neck tickling every time she’s facing the other bank. She’d considered going to see Autumn at the bakery this morning, maybe even inviting her out on the boat for the day—but something stopped her. Yesterday, she’d been joy-drunk to see her friend. But it’s like the antennae on her emotional TV is constantly shifting out into static these days.

  That disconnected feeling within, a kind of numbing that she usually masks with a joke, with a hasty one-off, feels like something that began here in the town where she grew up. Here, she is grounded enough if she keeps busy, if the things that matter are held up an inch before her eyes. There’s the elementary school where Sasha pushed Lil on the swings; there’s the Baptist church where they rescued the records of “devil’s music” waiting for a bonfire; here is home. Mom was here.

  And out there? Out there, maybe because she’s out there, there’s no mask locked onto her face. She managed to have things: her place in the group show in Queens, showing her photos. A few kind oddball people who, bizarrely, wanted her around. Linda, a sculptor with a studio apartment and a great teaching gig, with books on art theory up to the ceiling and a wide-open, miraculously undamaged heart. Sasha would dive in, seize on to those bright-hot flares of the missing thing, wrap her fingers around an opportunity or a person or a place that seemed, for a moment or two, real—

  But just as she secured her grasp, really sank her teeth in, whatever it was that had drawn her in was just gone. Those big-city folks, her rich art types, couldn’t understand her origin story. Of course they’d struggled, just like everyone does. But Sasha had different hurts, the pain of a small-town queer coming of age, of a mom who seemed to gravitate toward her sister instead of her, of the silent broken heart. Someone in New York would laugh at something a little too hard or say something glib about where she was from, and a vast canyon would open up in her. Sasha would be left in a room full of strangers—maybe one room, a bright, colorful apartment full of ideas, and just one stranger—full of expectations Sasha found she couldn’t rise to.