He rented a cabin in a parched clearing about four hundred miles from Moraine, and sat with his binoculars, watching the meadow in front of his window fill with cranes and empty of them. I joined him when I could, and when the cranes moved on to their winter ranges, he made the long drive to my place and we roamed the valleys together, picking up bits of information for Fish and Wildlife, trying to put together stories or evidence of life that wasn’t there. Or wasn’t there in enough abundance to mean much of anything at all.

  May’s book sold well. He breathed new life into the Dispatch in a podcast called Reminiscences, in which he invited callers to recount their memories of Island City—how it was last year, or ten years ago, or twenty. And people did call, people still on the ground, holding out to the last; and people who had fled long ago but remembered it as the home they wished they’d never left. For the first time, May shared his own memories, too. He talked about how for so long he had failed to understand what it would take to become of the city, not simply to live in it. He talked about Benjamin Bowen, and he talked about his time in the Exchequer Street station. Almost nobody ever asked him about Maryam Handak, though he continued to bring her up in the hopes that her mother might hear and reach out. For years, she did not.

  May’s own mother, Ellen, did come to stay with him one summer. I drove down to finally meet her. She was quite old by then, and movement was burdensome to her, painful and exhausting. She spent most of her time sitting in the cabin window, watching the grasses for signs of life. Shuffling over to the glass whenever a prairie dog reared up in the sage. When she felt sociable, she told us stories of her youth, her time on the Plains before the drought came, her years with May’s father on the wind farm. It was odd to hear her refer to May as “Lamb.” But that’s what he was to her. Lamb Osmond. I tried calling him that once, just to get a feel for it—but it was unwieldy and intrusive, and I never did it again.

  When the fires came, Ellen had to cut her trip short because the smoke gave her lungs too much trouble, and she kept insisting that if a burn happened in the woods above May’s place, she wouldn’t be able to flee. “You’ll try and save me,” she said, “and end up dying yourselves.” There was quite an elaborate cascade of horrors attached to this scenario, so we relented and bought her a ticket on the next train out of Red River.

  The night before we drove her to the station, after I had gone to bed, she apparently took May’s hand and said, “Ailin Handak wrote me—Maryam’s mother.” May froze up. “She said, ‘Mother to mother, I carry you in my heart. But it’s not my place to forgive your son. That’s for him and my Maryam to work out between them.’ You know?”

  We finally convinced my mother to come visit. She took the train out of Sebastien and traveled for three days by rail to the Sol Dorado station, where I picked her up this morning. Standing there with my little sign, and trying to drive away the urge to let my mind touch the old Polaroid that had suddenly turned up on the forums, the one of me and her and Bezi Duras and her boys disappearing up the hill behind us.

  My mother stepped off the train. The dread would not leave me, even when I hugged her, and by then I knew why. It was because something had shifted out of place. They were all suspended in stasis—Bezi, Mila, Rait Belen, even the versions of myself and my mother who were in that photograph. Seeing them in the context of our new lives made it feel like somebody was digging up our bones.

  It was another thousand miles back to Moraine. We drove past the burned-out ghost towns of the middle prairie, past Cansee and Sun City, and by that evening were crossing the desert, stopping so that I could show my mother the way the gradations of the setting sun lingered in perfect strata in the sky. My mother had lost the index and middle fingers of her left hand in yet another diving accident, and I had been living in Moraine for almost ten years.

  “Moraine,” she muttered, when we crossed the state line. “Who in the world would’ve thought it.”

  I guessed what she meant was: Who in the world would have thought that you, a child of cities—and not just any cities, but very old ones—would end up belonging to such a distant wilderness. I’d been eager to show it to her: the swales red with willows come fall, and the way those last few elk would glide across the refuge at dawn like mirages. My greatest fear was that she would not be moved.

  “It’s in the middle of nowhere all right,” I said.

  But she shook her head. “No. What I mean is: you were born in a place that no longer exists—and now, well. Here you are.”

  Something about the way she said it felt chastening, even though it was clear that she did not mean it to be. What she meant was that our long journey had somehow rendered my place of birth arbitrary. It had long ago ceased to exist on maps that were being produced, a piece of an older time that had sheared off and crumbled into the sea. And now I belonged far more relevantly to this other place, which, in the days when she had been studying maps, had been just as arbitrary, a landlocked point on a distant continent, something she never gave a second thought. Yet here it was, stretching out before us in every direction, empty and treeless.

  Around nine, we pulled off the highway, into a little campsite. There were a dozen or so other cars scattered among the low, flat bushes in the shadow of a bluff. We drove around the side and across a cattle guard so we could, in my mother’s words, “have nobody at our backs”—but without feeling like we couldn’t rejoin the group in the event of trouble. A little light still clung to the sky, and we pumped our water and warmed some beans and spinach on the camp stove and sat in the open hatchback, watching the last pale blue light fade. It was another half hour before all the stars came out, millions of them. By then it was night in earnest, moonless and endless. My mother got out of the hatchback and lay down on the ground. Every few minutes, she waved her little whiskey flask in my direction. After a time, I climbed down and joined her. Someone in the nearby encampment was chasing chords on a guitar.

  “It’s so bright out,” my mother said.

  I had to admit it was.

  “There are so few places where it’s really dark. Where you really can’t see anything.”

  “What’s that like?” I asked her, suddenly determined to skip all the hesitant, introductory parts, the part where I asked her whether she knew of any such places, and the part where she said yes and then went quiet again and quickly changed the subject.

  She thought about it. “Well, true darkness is cold. Right now, for instance—it’s nighttime, and getting cooler every minute. But the places where you see light”—she fanned her three fingers to indicate the heavens and a distant fire in the campground—“give you a feeling of warmth. I guess it’s an illusion. None of that warmth’s actually reaching you. But when you see it, your brain believes a little that maybe it is.”

  “It must have been bone cold in the Martinique,” I said. “Because of the water.”

  “Well, the wet suit was meaningless after a while. Especially after I took off my gloves. I couldn’t see anything at all. Sil, I mean anything. Couldn’t tell where I was. A few minutes would pass, and I’d think, ‘Oh it’s coming clearer now, the light is coming.’ But it was just my brain playing tricks on me, and when I realized that I’d panic all over again. So I took the gloves off so I could feel the water, and feel around in front of myself. Just to give myself some sense of space. To be able to feel accurately if I could see nothing.”

  “Have you figured out where you were?”

  “I guess what had happened was, the pylons fell, and when the water surged it carried me a couple of rooms over from where I was working and lodged me in an air trap. The girl who got me out said it was between two elevator banks. I was afraid to swim too far, in case the tide pulled me back out through whatever tunnel I’d been carried in along and pinned me up against the ceiling. I could tell that the walls were smooth. That old marble, I think. Eventually—I think at least the first night had passed—I found a little ledge with a hooked piece of metal above it, which I guess was where the security camera had once been. I hung on with one arm for a while, and then the other. I got the idea to make a kind of sling out of my mask—I let the strap out as far as it would go, and then I got my arm through it and sort of hung there. It kept me from having to kick, so I didn’t get as tired—but then I was colder, of course. Whenever one arm went numb, I’d switch to the other one. A couple of times I fell asleep and dropped out of the sling.”

  “God.” I wanted to squeeze her hand, but I was worried that she’d had to fall away from me to talk about this, that touching her would bring her back and silence her. I couldn’t believe that I was finally getting the facts. And here I’d been thinking I would have to make them up for the rest of my life.

  “I could hear the water sliding against the walls. I didn’t worry that anything was in there with me until I started imagining things—that something had brushed up against me, or the sound of a distant splash. That would put me in a panic, because there was nothing to see, and so no way to reassure myself that it was all in my head. So all the singing I was doing to keep myself awake kind of died out because I got afraid that if something really was in there with me, I wouldn’t hear it coming closer.”

  She went silent for a while, and I thought that must be the end of it. Until: “You know, there was a brief moment at the very start where I was afraid of dying. But then the darkness and the cold—I felt pretty sure that if I died, I wouldn’t know it. And that would be all right. But the real fear came, I guess, sometime the second morning. Or—no. How long was I down there?”

  “Seventy-eight hours and twenty-two minutes,” I said.

  “Well. The real fear came when I started thinking about you. I’d lost all sense of time. And the more I tried to get it back, the more I started to feel that years had passed. I knew they hadn’t, of course—I knew it was only hours, maybe a day or so. But the not seeing and the not knowing disoriented me. And a little part of my brain started saying: It’s been years. And I couldn’t do anything to shut it up. Forget singing, or multiplying, or thinking about all the animal facts I knew. And the more I thought that years had passed, the more I started to wonder where you were. How the hell was I going to find you? And this all led to the conviction that it wasn’t me who was going to die. It was you. Maybe you were already dead. I pictured a thousand different ways that it could happen to you, up alone in the Morningside.” She clapped a hand against her face.

  “That’s why you said that.” I suddenly understood. “When they got you out.”

  “What did I say?”

  “You don’t remember? You said, ‘Please help my daughter—she’s dead.’ ”

  She shuddered.

  “It was a horrible thing to hear.”

  “Yes.”

  “The strangest thing was—I could see you,” I said. “I was up there on the thirty-second floor, with Mila. The choppers were out and all the lights on the building. I could see the whole site. And all I could think about was that I was looking at you. You were right there, and I didn’t have a way to see you. But if I just kept looking for long enough, maybe that would change. Like a Magic Eye picture or something.”

  “When I think about that poor girl. Mila. That poor mother. Dead now—and without a single answer about what happened to her.”

  It seemed necessary to tell my mother that it wasn’t her fault—but what good would that have done, really? She knew that, even if she couldn’t allow herself to believe it. “What about Rait Belen? Is he dead?”

  “I don’t know—I heard he returned to some village Back Home. But I don’t know if he’s still alive.”

  “He’ll outlive us all.”

  “I still can’t believe Popovich. Knowing who that man was, everything he’d done, and still offering him a home. I guess he thought nobody knew.”

  “Bezi Duras knew,” I said.

  “Did she?”

  “Yes. She was always suspicious of Mila. Always trying to get Mila to speak to her in Ours. She didn’t have much language herself after so many years abroad, but she could tell Mila was keeping something back. And she could tell there was something about Mila worth puzzling out.”

  “That girl had razor wire around her—and who could blame her? Imagine being steeled all your life for the inevitability that your father was going to be accused of horrors you couldn’t even fathom, and then having to believe that no matter what you hear, none of it is true. That your father is a good man. A hero. That everyone else is wrong, and you are right.”

  “She had the right temperament for it.”

  “You always believed she’d be found.”

  “I believed she wasn’t dead. I still believe it.”

  “Foolish girl. Why?”

  “Because—Bezi Duras once told her she was stone all the way down. And it was true. And people like that, they don’t just die. They crawl out from under bridges after a thousand years of entombment with their teeth gritted and keep right on living. But they don’t just die.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  I let myself think. “Remember when I was so sick and quiet that fall we first moved in with Ena? Well, I saw Bezi Duras’s mastectomy scars, and I thought it meant something about her.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. But I told Ena about it before she died and she told me that Bezi Duras’s dogs were actually human men, transformed.”

  “Oh, Ena.” My mother put her hands over her face. “Always spinning nonsense for you—it drove me crazy. Rest her soul.”

  “Well, I not only believed it, but I spent the whole of that year trying to prove it. I wanted to be able to tell you it was true. That night I went missing? We were following Bezi and the dogs out onto South Falls Island.”

  My mother sat up and looked at me. “I could’ve killed you. I came home and you weren’t there. I called the police, and they told me you’d be home when you got hungry.”

  “Well. Now you know. That’s where we were.”

  “God. How crazy. I could strangle Ena for that. I wish you’d been out doing something normal—sneaking into a party or something. Following Bezi Duras to South Falls Island because you thought her dogs were human men. God in heaven.” She was still staring at me. “Did she know you were following her?”

  “I don’t think so.” Then I told the truth: “I don’t know.”

  “So if something had gone wrong—if someone had stolen you, or worse. Not a soul in the world would have known what happened to you.” I looked into this abyss with my mother. It was the worst thing she could think of, and suddenly it was the worst thing I could think of, too.

  “I wasn’t afraid enough of the city, I guess.”

  “No, that’s not it. I didn’t grow up afraid, either. But I think when you have that mindset that Ena kept trying to shove you toward—that magic nonsense. You don’t have a sense of true consequences. Everything comes out okay somehow, because somebody has to be left standing at the end. But people aren’t left standing. Thousands, hundreds of thousands, have died and nobody knows about them. They’re buried God knows where. Like that poor girl.”

  “She’s not dead.”

  “See? That’s Ena talking. That’s Ena’s belief.”

  “It’s not belief. It’s certainty.” Here was the door, and I walked right through it. “When you went missing, I asked Bezi Duras to take Mila instead of you.”

  My mother went still. “What are you talking about? What do you mean, take?”

  “I didn’t want you to die. I thought she could help. So I asked her.” She was quiet long enough for me to believe I had an opening. “You’ve thought it was your fault this whole time. But you see, it was actually mine.”

  She laughed. “God forbid—hush now with that nonsense.” I felt her hand on mine in the dark. And that was all, really. After all this time, that was all. My mother said, “I never wanted you in the grip of that folksy stuff.”

  “But you were raised with it, too. The folksy stuff.”

  “Yes, but—but that’s not what Back Home was like. Ena wanted you to think it was all forests and toadstools and magic violins, but it wasn’t like that at all.”

  “It was for Ena.”

  “But not for me. My youth was the stuff of life. So was hers, until the world turned vicious and broke her heart. We’d ride our bikes up the coast in the morning. Her and me and all the neighborhood young people. Backpack on and a little jacket rolled up for later, and some money in case you wanted to buy something, though we almost never did. Just a line of us pedaling up the highway and the cars all beeping gently to let us know if one of us strayed into the road. This vendor at the halfway point who always had apricots to give us—for free, because we were just kids, and she knew our mothers, and it made her happy to see us go by, it gave her a sense of safety to know that we were always coming up on a Saturday, and we always would. We’d ride right into the city and leave the bikes in a big heap by the fountain and then wander around, getting ice cream, peering into the bookshops. The musicians were always there, so the air was filled with music—all different kinds, a violin on this corner, a soprano on that one, boys rapping and handing out their clips as you walked by. Café after café full of life, people, conversation. And the beautiful city girls with their loose hair and bare arms. Your aunt Ena, she lived those things—but they didn’t mean the same thing to her. When she was young, in the time when she was most herself, when she wanted to burst out of the stitching that held her together, she wasn’t allowed to be part of it the way I was. She didn’t feel safe in it. So what she carried with her was that old stuff, death and enchantment. But my life was very different.”