I am the only person on the boat’s outside deck. There are no tourists taking pictures of the Seattle skyline. There is no Seattle skyline. The ferry horn blows its sad announcement into the night: I am here. I am coming.
The fires are getting close. The dusty ash falls from the sky and makes a shape around my body, and I am a brittle shell with nothing inside.
32
I do not need roads. I will walk through the forest. I will walk miles and miles and miles. I will cross through the middle of the island where the giant estates have not yet taken over, where there is still wildness, where, despite the smoke and shrinking lake and cracked earth, the animals and plants have no idea what any of us have done.
* * *
• • •
I try to call Lily but no one answers. I don’t know what time it is in Taiwan.
* * *
• • •
You can see so much through glass.
The window into Ash’s living room glows like a computer screen in the dark. Tami has cleaned herself up. She is sitting on the couch, in the same place I first saw her this afternoon. How is it possible this is the same day?
She is drinking one of the good bottles of wine from the prized collection in the cellar. The giant screen in the corner is turned to one of those reality shows where a bunch of nearly identical women fight over a man none of them know.
She is so sure she’s the winner.
* * *
• • •
I am walking blind, barefoot. Nothing but shadows and texture and sounds I cannot name. Branches grab at me, scratching my legs, my arms, my face, tugging at my hair. This is not a trail. I may not be going in the right direction. But I am moving. That’s the point. I am not standing still.
* * *
• • •
Tami’s almost done with the bottle of wine. Her lips are stained purple. Her eyes are slits.
On the television, it is time for the elimination ceremony.
Tami says to no one, “I am not a loser.”
* * *
• • •
How long have I been here? Did I go into the forest only to come out in the exact same place? Have I been walking in circles this entire time?
Why can’t I get away from these people?
* * *
• • •
“He’s in there breaking up with her,” Ivy says. We are in the bushes together. We are on the outside looking in. Where did Ivy come from? I thought I’d left her too. Why is she so hard to get rid of? Why does she always know where to find me?
“It doesn’t look like they’re breaking up,” I tell her.
“I want to make sure he’s okay,” she says. Her skin is scratched and bleeding. “I want to make sure Tami doesn’t hurt him. He’s going to need me as soon as she leaves.”
“I don’t think she’s leaving,” I say.
“He’ll need me to help him pack.”
She is looking right through me. From this angle, she cannot see Ash walking into the living room with a towel wrapped around his waist, his hair wet from the shower. She cannot see Ash and Tami kissing in the living room. She cannot see him not thinking about her at all.
“You have to turn him in,” I tell her. “You have to tell someone what happened. People saw your car. It’s only a matter of time. The cops will think it was you.”
“We’ll say the car was stolen. Someone took it for a joy ride. They abandoned it in SODO. It happens all the time.”
“But whose fingerprints are on the steering wheel?”
She says nothing.
“He’s dead, Ivy. Vaughn is dead.”
“I already bought the plane tickets.”
* * *
• • •
My feet are bleeding. My skin is coated with pine needles. Spiderwebs are stuck to sweat and blood. My lungs are clouds of smoke. We are not supposed to be outside like this.
* * *
• • •
This is what it looks like when Tami breaks someone down. She dials a three-digit number into a phone and then hands it to Ash. I know what Tami’s smile means. He takes a deep breath and looks her in the eye as he begins talking. I can’t read all the words, but only one is important. I know the shape of Ivy’s name on his mouth.
I turn to Ivy and her face is changing, morphing, twisting. I feel the weight of her, the light sucking in and disappearing. She will collapse under her own gravity.
A black hole is a star dying.
“Ivy,” I say.
The sun is starting to rise. Metallic blue peeks over the treetops.
“Ivy,” I say again.
Then she starts running.
Deep in the forest, there is no dawn. It is still too dark to see any edges. Ivy is far away and I cannot see where she stops and I begin.
I have lost her.
I am lost.
* * *
• • •
I wake up in the forest. It was all a nightmare.
Maybe Ash and Ivy are already on that plane, high above the smoke, watching the rest of us suffocate.
Here’s my favorite big rock. Here’s my climbing tree. Here’s the pear tree and the apple tree and the Italian prune. Here is my familiar clearing in the forest where the sky opens, where the sun reaches down into the garden and helps Daddy’s garden grow. I feel relief, but it is short-lived.
The garden is overgrown, unrecognizable. The deer fence is down, the metal wires pulled into the earth by layers of plant life, generations upon generations of growth and decay.
And there, where my house should be, is nothing but vine-covered ruins.
33
I wake up to the smell of smoke. I should be used to it by now—the smell of the world on fire, even with all the doors and windows closed, even with all the ways we try to shut it out.
Please come over is the text I find from Ivy. I am in my bed, Gotami curled up in my armpit, my head pounding. Hazy images flash through my mind, and I don’t know if they are memories, or my imagination, or random neural firings. Daddy thinks our dreams are our subconscious trying to tell us things. Papa says they’re just waste products from the trash compactors inside our brains that clean things out when we’re sleeping. He thinks dreams are literally garbage.