“Tears?” I said.

  “Of course.”

  I thought about it. “And it’s all gone?”

  “All of it. The town, the bridge, the mountain. Washed away in the slide.”

  “And the Vila? What happened to her?”

  Aunt Ena closed the album. “What happens to any woman who gets to be a certain age? She becomes comfortable in her ways and gets strange looks when she leaves the house.” I got the sense that she had said this more for her own amusement than my edification. I frowned. “Nobody knows. As the world breaks, the Vilé move on. There must be hundreds of them drifting along just like the rest of us.”

  I sat with this for a bit. “And my grandmother’s orchards?”

  “Gone.”

  “I wish I could remember them.”

  Ena squeezed my shoulder. She led me to the kitchen, and from the bottom refrigerator shelf, she excavated a bundle tightly wound in brown paper. Inside was a jar, mostly empty save for a thick crystallized layer of some purplish substance at the very, very bottom.

  “Jam,” Ena said. “From your grandmother’s figs.”

  I peered down at it, this precious stuff, soil and water and sunlight and the fruit they had borne, all concentrated into half an ounce of brittle darkness at the bottom of a jar.

  Ena nudged me. “Let’s have some.”

  “No! Really?”

  “Only because you didn’t ask.”

  She doled out a bit for me and a bit for herself on the tip of a spoon. It was dry and waxy at first, but after a while of warming on the tongue, it gave up a faint and distant sweetness that grew and spread.

  “Breathe in over it,” Ena said, while I stood there, not daring to swallow for fear of losing the taste. “Good stuff, right?” She watched me closely. “Does it make you remember anything?”

  Because it made me think of sunlight, I said, “I think so.”

  Ena nodded. “It helps, doesn’t it?”

  We’d been living with Ena for about two months when my mother reached out to the school to see about enrollment. My name was put on a wait list, where it was preceded, my mother was made to understand, by the names of thirty-nine individuals not in the Repopulation Program. A number of factors could still alter my place on the list: my willingness to take certain supplementary aptitude tests, for instance; or my fellow wait listers’ willingness to do the same; or, more important, their parents’ willingness to grease regulatory palms with something other than the Repopulation credits on which my mother and I depended. In any case, there was no point in holding out hope that I would start before next fall. This was disappointing news to everyone, especially my friendless self.

  Gloomily, I pulled Mrs. Sayez’s fun cards out from under my side of the mattress. What is your level of satisfaction with your new home? What do you like most about your new home? What would make your new home even better? The answers—or at least those my mother would expect me to give if I made the indefensible mistake of putting pen to paper in this context—were quite obvious. High. Everything. Nothing. But would it really be so terrible if, in response to the final question, I instead wrote: The opportunity to attend one of your fine institutions of learning? What would happen if I dropped the card in the mailbox the next time I was hauling the trash cans in off the street? In my mother’s version of the world, uniformed men would presumably appear in the doorway. They would sit me down in one of the Morningside’s several cold storage units and press me until I turned blue. Why had I answered the question this way? Was I dissatisfied with my present situation? How about the Repopulation Program—did I feel it wasn’t doing right by me? And why had I left the other two questions blank? What would my response have been if I’d had the integrity to answer them? And so on.

  But what if, instead of this scenario, my answer was simply filed alongside hundreds of others and studied as part of the Repopulation Program’s efforts to improve their work? It might not happen in time to help me—but it might help some other schoolworthy newcomer down the road.

  * * *

  —

  To pass the time, I made myself useful around the Morningside. Ena insisted that I should never be observed doing work, especially by the janglers, and especially by members of the building’s Board. Jobs suited to me were the kind that could be accomplished in secret, in solitude, like going around to all the empty apartments and checking them for signs of what Ena called “disruption.” You would be forgiven for assuming, as I did, that vacancy was deadening. But no—old buildings are full of life, full of movement and crisis. Radiators leak. Pipes burst. Mice chew through plaster and wire. When such things happened in occupied apartments, residents were there to sound the alarm. But disruptions in vacant units could go unnoticed for weeks, sometimes months, often to great detriment. It was my responsibility to investigate and ensure that stillness reigned as it should.

  I would usually find the units in good order: clean, softly lit, quiet save for the squeak of my sneakers on the ancient varnished floors. The disruptions I uncovered tended to be small. A window left inexplicably open. A ceiling fixture that had fallen, after years of apparent stability, and now lay shattered on the floor. The desiccated corpse of a bat that in life had found its way in through some mysterious opening, which would then have to be located and sealed.

  The most persistent disruptions were caused by the birds. Rook cranes wily enough to nest, unobserved, for a week or a month on a balcony would leave behind spoil heaps of feathers, twigs, and partially digested prey. Disposal of these piles required gloves and a mask, and my mother had forbidden me from touching them. But they were irresistible. Apparently, such a heap somewhere down-island had once produced a human rib bone, leading to brief hysteria on the Dispatch. But all I ever found were frog carcasses and fish spines—shining silver needles that barbed your fingers if you were careless picking them up.

  It was during the covert investigation of one such heap that my life rerouted. I was on a balcony on the thirty-second floor, crouching against the barricade overlooking the shaft that ran up and down between the penthouse tower and the east wing of the Morningside. The spoil heap before me had yielded a few predictable disappointments: rat teeth and fur. From where I crouched, I could make out where runoff from the gargoyles overhead had begun darkening the walls with skeins of something slippery and probably living. I was sure someone would look out and spot me. But the windows facing the shaft belonged mostly to back bedrooms, and apart from the occasional outline of a painting or mirror on some distant wall, or shadowy movement signifying some resident crossing a curtained room, there was little to see. I had just begun to poke around in the pile when my gaze sailed across the shaft and into the window one floor up and across.

  A woman stood there, in the penthouse, dressing or undressing—but in any case, naked from the waist up. Her head was out of sight above the blinds, but I knew it must be Bezi Duras. On either side of the huge blue pendant lying flat against her sternum, where her breasts should have been, grinned two long, ragged scars.

  They were in view for only a moment. She turned away from the window and then a silk white shirt dropped over what I could see of her back, and it was over. She did not reappear. She did not look down and see me. But just the same, it seemed necessary to crawl off the balcony and retreat to the cool darkness of the empty apartment, where I stood for a long time, measuring by the beats of my heart when it might be safe to move again.

  Hours later, still flushed, I picked through my rations in silence. My mother’s hand was bone cold against my cheek. “You’re burning up.” Her lips dropped to my forehead and rested there. “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing,” I lied, and I took care that night to keep my wakeful tossing from exposing my torment.

  What was the matter? This was hardly the first time I had seen something I shouldn’t have. Back in Paraiso, through the window across the street, I had borne frequent witness to the passions of Signora Tesseretti, who had a habit of entertaining other men while her husband was at work. I immediately reported these sightings to my mother, whose outward acknowledgment of my innocence in spying such antics was always accompanied by a small spark of blame. True, she said, I would not have seen anything if our neighbor had been more discreet. But perhaps I would have seen even less if I had been less curious, more honest, more wholesome in my impulses.

  This trespass against Bezi Duras felt particularly devastating. There was nothing illicit about it. Though it embarrassed me to see her naked, I hadn’t intended for it to happen. She had merely been getting dressed. Also, while the neighbor in Paraiso had been engaged in something morally questionable, there was no doubt—in my mother’s assessment of the situation, anyway—that she’d been having a very good time doing it. Here, on the other hand, was a thing that could not be considered good, no matter how you tilted the prism. Something had happened to Bezi Duras. Some violence. Somebody—or something—had hurt her horribly. Horribly enough to leave massive purple wounds. These wounds were kept hidden, a secret known only to Bezi herself. And by showing up at the wrong place at the wrong time, I had robbed her of her solitude in that secret. Worse still: Bezi Duras hadn’t seen me. She had no idea, as she knotted her hair and leaned toward her mirror, that not fifteen feet below her the girl gathering up bucket and rags and retreating into the cool sanctum of 32F had intruded on her greatest vulnerability.

  It must have been Bezi’s ignorance of the truth that brought me this deep sense of shame. To harbor such knowledge in and of itself felt wrong. Yet at the same time, I was suddenly the only person responsible for it. If I told nobody, nobody would know. I had the power right then and there to carry her secret with me in silence forever—and for some reason, this was even more unbearable. But to whom could I unburden myself? Certainly not to my mother. She would ask questions. She would want to know why I’d been out there on the balcony, and even if I lied, she would guess that I had been doing something I shouldn’t have, and then she’d go up to 32F and discover that I’d been digging around in a spoil heap—which, by virtue of its being forbidden, would cast a shadow over the whole rest of my story. Suddenly, every inch of the event would be subjected to the blinding spotlight of my mother’s suspicion. Where exactly had I been crouching when I looked up and saw Bezi Duras? Had I stayed there when I realized she was naked, or had I done the polite thing and turned away from this vulnerable and unsuspecting stranger? Had I been observed in my transgression? Had Bezi Duras said anything to me since then, intimated in any way that she had seen me, and that my mother and Ena were thus implicated in my wrongdoing?

  Absolution lay on the far side of a vast chasm of unknowns. There would be too many questions to get around, too many opportunities to further enervate my already exhausted mother.

  I was doomed, then, to carry this terrible knowledge around in silence. What did that say about me? A better daughter would surely have come clean, withstood her punishment, and gone up to the penthouse to apologize.

  This daughter, however, folded to her old impulses and snuck a pair of scissors under the living room sofa and her mother’s empty perfume bottle under the kitchen sink. But that only added to my misery. The protection was half-baked, and I knew it. Without a third talisman, the items were useless, nothing more than a reminder of my failure to rid myself of the habit I’d sworn would not follow me out of Paraiso.

  Well into the following week, I had trouble breathing, trouble swallowing. Meals wouldn’t go down. Air wouldn’t come up. I must have dropped a couple of pounds, because my beleaguered mother dragged me to some seedy medic. I was surprised when he said I had a cold, and not an actual stone lodged in my throat.

  This might have gone on for months. Me, ghouling around in a half-nourished state, while the scissors and the perfume bottle languished in useless malignancy in their respective hiding places.

  But things came to a head one evening not long afterward. I was in the courtyard running out the hose for Ena while she power-sprayed the flagstones. Overhead, wisps of cloud turned from October yellow to nightfall gray. I heard Ena mutter, “Here she comes,” and sure enough, here she came: Bezi Duras was leaving the little back alley that led to her private elevator. She was an immensely tall woman, taller than I’d expected, thin and long-necked, standing ramrod straight despite the bulk of a backpack slung between her slim shoulders. Her pale hair was drawn up in a bun at the nape of her neck. The dogs massed around her waist. Ena had made them sound like big, lavish nuisances. Spoiled and unruly. Maybe a little overweight. Nothing could have been further from the truth. They looked like they were made of soot and steel wool. As though they’d started out as gaunt shadows long ago and somehow assembled themselves over the years from leaves and bits of darkness they’d rolled in along the way. Wiry, black, wolfish things with diamond-hard eyes. They were not so much leashed as chained to Bezi, all three of them clipped into a belt that was cinched around one of the same white blouses I had seen her pulling over her scars the week before.

  Ena called out, “Good evening!” in English.

  Bezi Duras turned around. “Good evening.”

  Ena’s thick-gloved finger swung obtrusively in my direction. “This is my niece, Silvia.”

  There was Bezi Duras. Looking at Ena. Then looking at me. Smiling only with her mouth. I made the mistake of meeting her gaze. If her voice had erupted in my head, I would not have been surprised. It seemed already present in everything, an oceanic boom all around me. She knew. She knew I was hiding something. In fact, there might be nothing Bezi Duras did not know. That my mother was a foundling. That I had failed to kick the habit of laying out protections. That a man I’d never seen before had pulled down his pants in front of me in a Paraiso alleyway, and that I had run away shouting, as well as a thousand other secrets I had willed myself to forget, all the little sins that had scattered into the unlit corners of my heart: That I used to cry myself to sleep, praying for my father’s return. That I knew the taste of flesh because I had once eaten meat—inadvertently, when a patron of the hotel where my mother worked had offered me a bite of it as I passed her table, and I (three or so, underfoot) had leaned in and gummed it off the end of her fork without a second thought, to the horror of my mother, who was watching from the corner, or so she kept telling me, because I had no memory of this event, though my mother had relived it often enough for me to form a kind of half reel of it, all in the third person.

  All this knowledge Bezi Duras carried through the main gate and out into the street, where the dogs hauled her up the darkening hill and out of sight.

  Ena turned to me. “Why didn’t you say good evening—what’s the matter with you?”

  What a question. Maddening, unanswerable. I sat down on the stairs and heaved a sigh that was meant to convey just how burdened I was with things that could not be shared. Ena’s elbow dug into my arm. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Nothing.”

  She must have decided that some ordinary niece nonsense was behind all this. She went on watering while I sat uselessly there, willing myself to honesty. Why was it so difficult to admit?

  “I know something about Bezi Duras.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know how to tell you.”

  Ena shut off the water. “What is it?”

  “I’m not sure I can say.”

  “Is it something bad?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Something dangerous?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “It’s about the dogs, isn’t it?”

  I frowned. “No.”

  “You’ve figured it out, haven’t you?”

  “No, it’s about her—about Bezi.”

  “Oh. Well, what is it?”

  “Promise you won’t tell Mama.”

  Ena raised her hand solemnly.

  “Bezi Duras hasn’t got any breasts.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She has these scars.” I showed her on myself, clear across one side and then the other. “I think someone really hurt her.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I saw her changing in the window. I didn’t mean to.”

  “And that’s all?”

  “That’s all.”

  Ena looked—what? Disappointed? Relieved? “She was probably just sick, is all.”

  “Cancer,” I said somberly.

  “Most people get it.”

  “Why did they cut off her breasts?”

  “So it wouldn’t spread. God, Sil, you ridiculous girl. You gave me a fright.”

  “I’m sorry.” It didn’t seem like she was going to berate me further. “I just felt bad for knowing something like that about her without her meaning me to. I needed to say it.”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone.”

  “Thanks.”

  She lowered the nozzle of the hose again and sent the water hissing into the grooves between the pavers. She looked relieved. Why? What had she thought I had figured out?

  “What did you mean about the dogs?”

  “I can’t hear you, Sil.”

  “The dogs! What did you mean? What did you think I’d figured out?”

  “Nothing.”

  It was my turn to be incredulous. “Ena!” I got up and went to her. “What is it? Tell me!”

  “I might,” she said. “But not today.”