The Lost

Chapter Seven

I circle the stuffed rabbit. The fur around his neck is worn so thin that it’s a net stretched over cotton. His head is flopped to the side. His tail is a matted gray tuft. He looks like the toy I remember.

Which is impossible, of course.

I lost Mr. Rabbit at the start of college, either in packing or unpacking. In a fit of maturity, I proclaimed it a sign that I was moving on, outgrowing my childhood talismans. Of course, I cried after Mom drove away, and I wished I hadn’t lost him.

And now he’s found.

Mr. Rabbit watches me with his one cracked eye. As a teen, I tossed him against the ceiling one too many times, and his left eye shattered into smooth shards that catch the light from the window so that he looks as if he’s winking. Only a few threads hold the eye on. He lost the right eye in the washing machine. Maybe his lost eye is here somewhere, too.

I want to laugh. I clamp my teeth together so that I won’t. If I laugh, I’ll cry. And I don’t want to cry. I squat in front of the rabbit. My heart thumps fast inside my ribs, as if my old toy is a grenade. “Are you what I lost?”

He doesn’t speak, which disappoints me. Says something about the kind of day I’m having that I expect this dirty lump of cotton to spew out answers, or at least a few prophetic riddles in rhyme. But he’s silent. Everything is as silent as dust. I don’t hear wind or birds through the open window. I continue to talk into the silence. “Even if you were, I’d need the Missing Man to send me home, right?” Sitting, I wrap my arms around my knees and squeeze. I feel as if I’m five years old again, pouring out my fears to my scruffy, germ-ridden, favorite toy. “So I’m supposed to believe it’s all true. Every crazy thing that every crazy person said to me today. The motel clerk selling suitcases. The waitress in the diner with the broken phone. The man looking for his lucky penny... Did he really sail here? And Peter? Who is he? What is he? Can I trust him?”

He still doesn’t answer.

He’s in a patch of sunlight that’s pouring in the open window. It’s low angled so his shadow streaks behind him across the wood floor. Low angled light means the sun will set soon, and then it will be dark. I think of the broken windows downstairs and wonder if it’s safe to sleep here. Not that I have much choice.

“You know this is completely fucked,” I tell the rabbit.

Claire pipes up. “That’s not a nice word.”

I jump to my feet. I hadn’t heard her come up the stairs, but here she is, staring at me with wide, round eyes as innocent as a doll. She’s not holding her bears. Or her knife.

“Just talking to Mr. Rabbit,” I say. “He’s heard that kind of language before. He knows not to repeat it in public.”

Claire nods as if this makes perfect sense.

Leaving the rabbit, I cross to the window. The sun is fat and low, and the reddish shadows make the clumps of brush and cacti look burnt. I shut the window. Lock it. Don’t feel safer. “Do you think we’re safe here?”

“Are you asking me or Mr. Rabbit?” Claire asks politely.

“Mr. Rabbit has a limited understanding of the concept of safety. Unless someone comes at him with scissors, he’s unfazed. Plus, he’s a rabbit of few words.”

Claire stands next to me, looking out the window at the endless sienna desert and the sunset-rose-wine-stained sky. She slips her small hand into mine. The bones in her hand feel so fragile, but she has calluses on her palm. I wonder exactly how much she’s practiced with that knife. “Most people don’t leave town,” she tells me, “especially not at night when you can’t see where the dark stops and the void begins. So we should be okay so long as we don’t turn on the lights. You can see lights from a distance.” She doesn’t sound like a kid. She sounds more like a soldier, assessing the situation.

I find that oddly comforting.

I nod as if it’s perfectly normal to spend the night somewhere you fear to turn on the lights. No night-light for me. “Just in case, I want to board up the broken windows downstairs, the one in the front door and any others with holes large enough to crawl through.”

“Okay.” Releasing my hand, Claire pivots and traipses downstairs without any further questions or conversation. Following her, I leave the stuffed rabbit in the patch of dying sun.

Claire is out the front door without pause. She scrambles onto the junk pile as if she’s part-cat, scaling the side with ease. But I hesitate on the porch. A heap like that could hide rattlesnakes. Or poisonous spiders. Or rabid wildebeests that like to rend the flesh of the recently lost. Certainly there are sharp rusted objects. But none of that stops Claire from scurrying over a broken tricycle, a dozen twisted coat hangers, an old microwave, and mildew-coated cardboard boxes that could hold anything from books to bandicoots.

As Claire climbs to the top of the heap, she disturbs a desk drawer with her foot, and paper clips tumble out in a metallic waterfall. They spill onto the ground, which is already littered with buttons and pennies and nails. It sounds like rain.

At the top, Claire lifts up a stop sign. It’s nearly as tall as she is, and she wobbles as she holds it. “How’s this?”

I want to yell at her to duck down. Anyone could see her, perched on top of the pile. But I don’t. I could startle her, and she could fall. Or someone unfriendly could hear my yell. Besides, she wasn’t the one who’d attracted the pissed-off mob. It’s me they want. Then again, they saw her rescue me... Keeping as low as possible, I creep up the side of the pile and take the sign. She scrambles off the heap past me and holds the front door open as I carry the sign inside. I prop the sign against the living room couch and study the window. I think it’s been broken for a while. Dust and debris have blown in, and the floor feels like a beach after a storm. “We’ll need to nail it over the window.” I hadn’t thought about the mechanics of boarding up the windows. It’s not something I have experience with doing. I need tools...

“Be right back.” Claire scampers outside again. Examining my sign, I wonder if there’s a street somewhere experiencing terrible accidents due to the lack of a stop sign. Before I can decide whether or not this is something I need to feel guilty about, she returns with an armful of tools—hammers, wrenches, clamps, an assortment of nails and screws and washers, and a car jack. She dumps them on the couch.

“That was quick.”

She beams at me as I select a hammer and a few nails. “People lose tools a lot. Much harder to find other things. Like cupcakes. No one ever loses cupcakes. I miss them.” Her smile fades. “We used to have cupcakes on our birthdays. Our neighbor Mrs. Malloy baked them. She put sprinkles on top. But she died, and I saw her sprinkles in the trash.”

A howl rips through the air.

I feel every hair on my arms stand up. My fingers tighten around the hammer. Claire, perched on the arm of the sofa, swings her legs back and forth, seemingly unconcerned. “You sometimes find lost cookies. People drop those behind couches and stuff. And I’ve found tons of French fries. But not cupcakes. Or ice cream.”

“Did you hear that?” I ask. It lingers in the wind, the howl stretching out like the tail of a comet, fracturing and eventually dispersing.

“It can’t hurt us,” Claire says. She considers her statement, her face screwed up as if she’s making intense calculations. “At least, it can’t after we seal the windows.”

“Right.” I lift the sign up and examine it. It has holes where it was bolted to its post. I position the holes over the window frame and nail it on, using washers to widen the size of the nail head, which makes me feel clever. The sign covers about a third of the bay window and nearly all of the section without glass. I face the “Stop” side out, in case any of the predators can read. The human ones can, I think. “Maybe we should board up all the windows.”

Claire shakes her head. “Then we can’t see them coming.”

Her statement makes me think of a half-dozen zombie movies, which is not comforting. “You need to work on your bedside manner.”

“What?”

“Never mind.” Continuing to hammer, I try not to focus on how this isn’t where I’m meant to be, how I should be home with Mom in our familiar apartment with its functional window locks, and how surreal and wrong all of this feels to the point where I wonder if I am having some highly vivid nightmare brought on by too much kung pao chicken. But I’ve never had a nightmare like this.

I have nightmares about Mom. In them, she’s in the hospital again with tubes stuck in her and a monitor counting her heartbeat as if it’s counting down to zero. Standing beside her, I feel a choking weight in my throat, but I can’t scream or cry or speak.

The thing that’s most horrifying and sad about my nightmares is that they’re banal, like scenes from a bad TV movie, fraught with melodramatic sadness and entirely generic. There’s nothing truly Mom in them. Lying in the crisp white bed, she’s in a washed-out pale blue hospital gown, and all the color is faded from her face and hair and eyes. On the windowsill there’s a row of bland sympathy cards beside a vase of plasticlike calla lilies. In real life, she hates phony cards and fake flowers. She loves to grow her own flowers: fat peonies that droop on their stems, roses that are riddled with holes from bugs, daffodils that shrivel within a week. When she moved into my apartment, she could only bring a fraction of her plants, but still her flowers have overrun the apartment and the tiny corner of the yard that the landlord granted us. She also loves handwritten notes. She keeps stationery, rich thick ivory paper, that she fills with her swooping handwriting any time a card is called for. Thinking about her ridiculous notes makes my throat constrict. I swallow hard and follow Claire outside again.

Around us, the light is failing fast. The sky is auburn-colored in the west and dusty dark blue in the east. Everything is beginning to look gray and muted, as if the sinking sun is siphoning the colors out of the world as it sets. I pull the desk drawer, the one that held the paper clips, off the junk pile, and I cart it inside to cover the bottom half of the kitchen window.

As I nail the drawer over the missing window panes, I wonder what Mom is doing right now. She’s most likely home, cooking herself dinner, worrying about me, with the TV a low-level hum in the background so that there are other voices in the apartment. She’ll be shredding fresh basil to top a tomato. She’ll have the window open over the sink (rather than nailed shut with a desk drawer), and her herb collection on the sill would be swaying in the breeze. She has a healthy collection of basil and sage and rosemary, due to the fact she always remembers to water her plants. I’d thrown out my last Christmas cactus—the only plant I was responsible for—because it was a desiccated husk. I wonder what she’d think of where I am, of this house, of Lost, of Claire, of Peter. I’ll tell her about it when I’m home, I promise myself. Maybe it will distract her from thinking about what a horrible person I am for leaving in the first place.

We have one window left that I want to cover, the one in the door. It isn’t large, and we find a sign from a deli to cover it. I hammer it on, driving a nail through a painted pickle. It feels satisfying to bash the nails as hard as I can.

“I’m hungry,” Claire announces.

“You’re saying that because of the pickle.”

“Or because I’m hungry.”

She skips out the door, and I catch her arm before she’s across the porch. She looks at me quizzically. “It’s getting dark,” I say, waving my hand at the deepening blue sky and the thickening shadows. I am trying not to think about what this place will be like when it’s pitch-black. I don’t want to be alone—Mr. Rabbit doesn’t count as company. Plus, Claire could encounter danger, like homicidal townies, feral dogs, or bandicoots, though I’m not entirely sure what a bandicoot is. Rodent of some kind.

She pats my hand as if to reassure me and then wiggles out of my grasp. “You stay here. I’ll be back.” She darts out the door, and I start to follow but then I hear the howl again. It freezes my body in place, even though my mind intends for me to chase after Claire. The howl is echoed by another wolf or coyote or feral dog or hell beast on the opposite side. By the time my bones unlock, Claire has disappeared into the shadows of the lawn and the towering junk pile. I swear under my breath.

Stepping off the porch, I call softly, “Claire?” I don’t dare shout. It feels as if the desert is listening. I wait, straining to hear any sound of her. But there’s only wind. It blows my hair against my face, and I wipe the strands away. Shadows are everywhere, layered thick like cloth, wrapping and hiding everything. The other houses blot out the deep blue sky. She could be near or inside any of them. I don’t think she stayed in this yard but still I call again softly, “Claire, we can wait and find food in the morning. It’s just one night. Come back. Please.”

The evening air smells almost sweet, which surprises me, given the junk pile. I’d expect it to smell like overripe fish or gym socks. Instead it smells like fresh mesquite and sage, like heated earth and dust. Overhead, there are stars spreading across the sky. It’s so stunningly beautiful that it freezes me as thoroughly as the bone-chilling howl did a few minutes earlier. I look for familiar constellations—Orion, the Big Dipper, Scorpius—but I don’t see them. Just an array of stars, scattered like glitter sprinkled over black felt.

“Pretty, aren’t they?” a voice comes out of the darkness.

I yelp, bolt inside the house, and slam the door. I then remember that Claire is out there with whoever spoke. Crap, I think.

Staring at the closed door, I can’t bring myself to open it again. Instead, knowing I’m a coward, I press my face against the half of the window that is intact and not covered by the deli sign. I peer out at the mountainous shadow of the junk pile on the lawn. I don’t see any movement, but of course it’s dark and—

Outside, a face presses itself against the glass.

I shriek again.

He grins.

Peter, my brain tells me. It’s Peter. I consider for a moment whether that makes me feel safer or not. I don’t trust him, but unlike the people in town, he doesn’t seem to want to hurt me. He did find me shelter, as he promised. And maybe he can help me find a way home, even though he and Claire said he couldn’t. I open the door.

He’s leaning against the door frame, arms crossed, which makes his muscles bulge. He pushed my car to town without breaking a sweat, so I shouldn’t be surprised that he looks strong enough to lift me over his head and twirl me like I’m a ballerina. But still, I stare at him. He’s nearly too beautiful to be real. He’s also grinning at me as if I’ve done something monumentally amusing. “Little pig, little pig, let me come in.”

“Didn’t you just leave?” I ask.

“I got bored.”

“You know it ruins a dramatic exit if you return a half hour later.”

“Next time, I’ll leave in a puff of smoke,” he promises.

I step out of the house onto the porch. “Did you see Claire— Wait, can you do that? The puff of smoke thing?” I don’t mean to be distracted when Claire could be in danger, but he seems so casually earnest.

“Water vapor, actually.”

“Really?”

“No. Sadly, I have no puffing abilities whatsoever. Told you, all I do is find people.”

“Can you find Claire?” And the Missing Man. And a way home.

“Not unless she’s lost in the void.” He scans the yard and the houses beyond. “She knows to be careful. Have faith in her.” But I think I hear a note of doubt in his voice. Or maybe that’s me, projecting my own fear onto what I hear. In a singsong voice, he adds, “‘All the world is made of faith, trust, and pixie dust.’ Except our dust is not exactly pixie dust.”

I listen to the wind cross the desert, stirring up brambles in the loose dirt. It’s still warm. I sit at the edge of the porch and stare out into the darkness. I wish I dared turn the porch light on, to force back the encroaching shadows. “She was hungry. Who takes care of her here? And the other kids in town?”

“You ask the wrong questions.” Peter steps up onto the porch railing. He walks along it, balancing, and it creaks under his weight. Any second it will snap. Before it can, he reaches up, grabs the gutter overhead, and swings forward to land catlike on the ground.

“How do I go home?”

“Better. But still not quite it.”

“How do I find what I lost?”

“Close.”

I want to yell at Peter, shake him until he tells me how to go home. But I don’t want to alienate the only person with answers who’s willing to talk to me. “So tell me. What should I be asking?”

He scoops a button off the ground and tosses it into the air. It’s a black disc that winks in the moonlight. “You could ask why the caged bird sings. Or what is in a name? ‘That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.’” He catches the button.

Breathe. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Stay calm. He might not even know how absolutely infuriating he is. Gorgeous, yes, but infuriating. “Where did you find Mr. Rabbit?”

“You know that’s a highly unoriginal name.”

“Can you just try to answer a question? Any question?”

“Granted, it’s more dignified than Mr. Bunny.”

I peer into the darkness for any hint of movement. She’s just a kid. I shouldn’t have let her wander off. I picture everything that could have happened to her: tripped over junk in the dark and broke her ankle; found by hungry feral dogs and ripped to bits; lost in the dark...or more lost. Lost in Lost. She knows this place better than I do, I think. My bumbling around after her won’t help. “Claire?” I call softly, knowing it won’t work.

She bounds out of the darkness like a happy puppy. Her arms are full of shoebox-size boxes. School lunch boxes. “Peter!” Her voice is full of joy. Running to him, she dumps the boxes into his arms, and then she skips over to me. He dramatically mimes being wounded by this quick rejection. She doesn’t see. “Entire school bus with backpacks and lunch boxes!”

“Great,” I say, and in the light of the moon, I see her smile. She has the ideal kid smile, one missing front tooth and one fat grown-up tooth, recently grown. Her cheeks puff up round like she’s a chipmunk with nuts. “Where are the kids?”

“What kids?”

“From the bus. The bus must have had kids that owned those lunch boxes.”

She shrugs. “Not in the bus.” She pauses. “But I bet they’re hungry.” She skips after Peter. I follow them inside and shut the door. Instantly, it’s darker. I widen my eyes as if that will help me see better, and I find the dead bolt by feel and slide it locked.

I wish there were more locks.

I wait in the hallway for my eyes to adjust. After a minute, I can see the shadows of furniture, a hint of the staircase, the dark holes that are the doorways. Feeling along the wall, I follow the sounds of Peter’s and Claire’s voices to the dining room, and I wonder if I should do something about a busload of kids who might or might not be here somewhere. I picture them scared and shivering in the cool desert night. I picture them shuffling off the bus as zombies. And I decide that since I can’t do anything about them and since I have zero evidence that this place has zombies, I refuse to worry about it.

The dining room is bathed in blue shadows. Over the table, the chandelier is a tangle of glass that catches the stray bits of pale blue moonlight. Peter dumps the lunch boxes on the dining room table—there are at least half a dozen. He and Claire rifle through them.

“Where did all this come from?” I ask.

“Told you,” Claire says, chewing. “School bus.”

“I mean, all the lost things. This place.” You. Me.

“From the void,” Peter answers, as if this were obvious.

“But what is the void? Do you mean the dust storm on the highway? It’s not just a storm, is it? Where did it come from? Is it always there? Why have I never heard of it, of Lost, of Finders and Missing Men? None of this should exist.” And I shouldn’t be here.

“Eat,” Peter says, not unkindly.

“But...”

“I don’t know,” Claire says. “But the void is real. I think.”

“It’s a servant of despair,” Peter says, “and it will destroy you if it can.”

“And you?” I ask. “What are you?”

“A servant of hope.” He bows but there’s no mocking in his voice or his eyes. In fact, he looks sad, an ancient kind of sad, as if he carries the weight of a century’s sorrow.

I don’t know what to say to that insanity. So I turn to Claire. Scooting past me, Claire selects a Disney princess lunch box and scurries to one corner. She tucks herself into the shadows, and I hear the snaps open on the box. I don’t know how she can see what she’s eating, or why she doesn’t sit at the table or closer to the window.

Maybe she’s used to hiding as she eats.

I try to imagine what her life has been like here, surrounded by madness, and I can’t. Near as I can tell, she’s been on her own, scavenging for herself, taking care of herself, with only Peter as an older brother figure. I don’t know what she’s had to do or how difficult it has been.

Crossing to the table to join them, I bump into one of the chairs. I push it aside. It’s coated in dust, and I wipe my palms on my pants before I pick up a Spider-Man box, open it, and feel around inside. One squishy sandwich. One limp banana. A plastic bag full of soft orbs, either old grapes or eyeballs. I shut the box.

Less hungry, I open a second box and feel a sealed package. Aha! Crackers? Maybe a package of crackers and cheese, or fake cheese since I doubt that orange goop has ever encountered a cow even in a former life. I tear open the package and test a cracker, nibbling at its edge. It’s actually a pretzel chip with a tiny cup of hummus, also sealed air-tight. Sliding into one of the dining room chairs, I eat a dinner that would probably appall my mother, even though it’s healthier than some of the dinners I ate in college. Mom is the sort of person known to slip pureed squash into brownie mixture. She’s been worse since...lately. Thinking about her makes the cracker taste like cardboard in my mouth. Peter continues to sort through the boxes. He tosses items over his shoulder. They splat on the floor.

“Somebody could slip on those, or trip,” I point out.

“How dreary—to be—Somebody!” Peter tosses an apple. It hits with a wet thump. I don’t hear it roll—too rotten, I guess. I can’t see it on the floor. I am going to step on it later, think it’s a dead mouse, and scream my head off.

“How public—like a frog,” I complete the line. “Yes, you read Emily Dickinson’s poems in school. Very impressive. Just for the record, cryptically quoting random famous people without attribution doesn’t make you deep, or change the fact that you’re making a mess.” From the corner, Claire asks, “You went to school?”

I wonder if she’s right to sound amazed. For all I know, Peter could have spent his entire life wandering into, out of, and through this town... Another thought occurs to me. “Aren’t you in school?” I ask Claire. “Is there a school here?”

“I loved school,” Claire says. There’s the same longing in her voice as when she’d talked about cupcakes. “Especially story time. Do you tell stories?”

She looks eager, as if she’d devour me if I say yes. “I don’t really know any stories.” I turn to Peter, away from her hungry eyes. I can’t see his eyes in the dark. His back is to the window. I wish he’d turn. “She should be in school.” She should be home with parents taking care of her, not here scavenging like an abandoned pet, but I can’t say that in front of her.

“I could find a school,” Peter says, as if it were like finding stray lunch boxes.

“You could send her where there are schools. Beyond Lost. Home.”

“Only the Missing Man can—”

“Yes, you said that. But you could find the Missing Man. You’re the Finder, aren’t you? So, why not find him?” I am trying to keep my voice steady and rational. I am not succeeding well. I don’t think he understands that I want to go home now, not next week, not next month.

“A Finder isn’t a bloodhound. I can only find those who are lost in the void—at least until they fade. But the Missing Man is absent, not lost. I see the kernel of hope inside the lost like a light in the darkness. Speaking of light...” He flips on the dining room light. It bathes the table in brightness, and my eyes tear.

I leap toward the switch. “No!” His hand is still on the switch. I force it down, his hand and the switch, extinguishing the light in the chandelier. The room plunges into darkness that seems deeper and fuller after the brief exposure to light. I see blotches of light, afterimages, overlaid on the shadow that is Peter. His hand turns under mine as if to catch my fingers. I draw my hand away. He talks like such a mystical creature that I’d forgotten he’s real and solid. But his hand felt warm. “It’s not safe,” I say. “The mob...they’ll see.”

I can’t read his expression. I can’t even see his face. I see him as a shadow in front of the dining room window, the moonlit desert and the hills of trash outside. He’s silent for a moment, and I have no idea if he’s angry or amused or confused or doesn’t care at all. “You don’t need to worry. I’ll protect you.” He says it with such casual certainty, as if protecting me from a crazed mob is no more complex or heroic than unclogging a toilet, and I feel...safe. It’s such a staggering feeling that for an instant, I can’t breathe. I hear the crinkle of plastic—he’s unwrapping food. He talks as he chews. “I can’t wait to see his expression when he comes back and discovers you’re here thriving! Never had a chance like this before.”

My mouth feels dry as the illusory feeling of safety shatters. I force myself to swallow and say in an even voice, “I don’t want to be used for your personal vendetta. I have to leave as soon as possible. My mother needs me.”

“Aw, vendettas are fun. Come on, everyone loves a good vendetta.”

“She’s... I have to leave.” I try to sound firm.

Peter heaves a sigh, stuffs another cracker into his mouth, chomps, and then swallows. “This is exactly why I don’t fraternize with the lost. All the whining.” He levels a finger at Claire. “You promised she’s different.” My eyes have adjusted again, and I can see his silhouette, the curves of his face and the shape of his shoulders. In his trench coat, he’s an imposing figure, exactly the type you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley. Or dark dining room. I don’t know why I want so badly to trust him, except that I want to trust someone and my choices are severely limited. He scoops another lunch box off the table and tucks it under his arm. “You’re all the same. I can’t imagine what the Missing Man saw in you.”

“Oh, don’t go, Peter!” Claire jumps to her feet. I hear her food spill onto the floor. There’s a glug as if a drink has poured out. “Please! She is different! I can tell!”

He ducks out of the dining room.

I follow him out of the dining room and halt in the hallway. “I didn’t mean...”

But the hall is empty.

At least, I think it is.

I peer into the darkness. I don’t see any movement. I touch the front door. The dead bolt is still locked. He couldn’t have left, at least not that way. “Peter? Are you here?”

He doesn’t answer. I step into the kitchen. The refrigerator is a hulking shadow in one corner. It hums, and I think about opening it for the light. But no. Can’t risk it.

I skirt around the kitchen table, and then I head for the living room. All the bookcases are shadows, as are the couch, the chairs, the coffee table. I don’t see his silhouette anywhere. I check both bedrooms as well as the bathroom. He could be in a closet or under a bed or hidden in one of the darker shadows in the corners of the rooms, but why would he be? “Peter!”

He can’t be upstairs. I would have heard the stairs creak. Still, I feel my way up the stairs, one step at a time, kicking each one before I step. It’s darkest in the middle of the stairs where the moonlight from windows above and below don’t quite meet. At the top of the stairs, I look around. The stuffed rabbit still sits in the middle of the floor. A small shadow, he looks lonely. The attic room is otherwise empty, and the window is still locked. I pick up Mr. Rabbit and carry him downstairs.

“Claire?” I return to the dining room.

“Did you find him?” She’s behind me. I jump.

I shake my head, then remember she most likely can’t see me. “He must have left.”

“But the door is still locked.” She’d noticed that, too. Smart kid. “Maybe he’s playing hide-and-seek! Olly olly oxen free! Come out, Peter!” She scampers through the house. I hear cabinet and closet doors open and shut.

After a few seconds of listening, I have an idea, born of supreme paranoia. I enter the kitchen and feel my way to the refrigerator. For the barest of seconds, I crack open the fridge enough so that light spills into the room. I see what I need: a mop. I shut the door, plunging the room into darkness that feels more complete than before, and I feel my way through the thick blackness to the mop. It leans in the space between the counter and the trash can. By the time I reach it, my eyes have adjusted to the darkness again. I leave Mr. Rabbit on the kitchen counter and take the mop.

With the mop, I follow the sound of Claire’s footsteps and join her in the second bedroom, her bedroom. She opens the closet door, and I jab into the closet with the mop and wave it back and forth. I hit only clothes. No one shrieks. We repeat the procedure under the bed and then we progress from room to room until we have swept every closet and cabinet large enough to hold a tall, muscular man.

In the hallway again, Claire says, “He really left.”

“He’ll be back in the morning. I’m his personal vendetta, remember?”

“Maybe he’s in the void. He enters it at least once a day to search for lost people.” She frowns prettily, the faint light from the front window falling across her face. “Or maybe he really doesn’t like you.”

I feel a pang at that thought but push it aside. I don’t care what he thinks of me, so long as he helps me get home. I don’t need to make friends, even with shockingly handsome and strangely fascinating men who might as well have walked right out of my subconscious. “Also possible.”

There isn’t much more to say or do after that. Feeling my way to the kitchen, I lean the mop against the wall where I found it and then I return to the hallway. I’ll clean up from dinner in the morning when there’s light. Or not, since I have no plans to stay here and it’s abandoned anyway. Besides, there’s a massive junk pile outside. Any mess inside pales in comparison.

To Mom’s chagrin, my half of the apartment isn’t known for its neatness. I hate the trip to the Laundromat so I divide my clothes into fresh, passably fresh, and doomed. The fresh clothes are in the closet and drawers. The doomed are in the laundry bag. But the passably fresh are stacked on the dresser, draped over a chair, and piled in the corner. At least I know what’s there. I don’t really know what’s in the corners of this house, even after prodding them with a mop. At best, spiders. At worst... “Guess we should sleep.” Granted, I can’t imagine how I’ll sleep here, knowing where I am, knowing what’s outside...or worse and more accurately, not knowing. But the doors are locked, the broken windows are fixed, and I can’t stand around in a dark hallway and worry the entire night.

I look at the door to the master bedroom. I can tell from the angle of the shadows that it’s halfway open. I think I left it that way when we searched the house, but I’m not certain.

“Good night!” Claire bounds into her room with more enthusiasm for bedtime than any six-year-old I’ve ever heard of. Maybe she’s excited to have her own room and her own bed. I don’t know for certain, but I bet she’s already slept in far more doorways and on far more benches than I ever have.

I stop by the bathroom first. Windowless, it’s so dark that I have to feel my way to the sink. I turn on the water, but I can’t see whether it’s clear or sludge. I don’t drink it, even though my mouth feels dry. Instead I splash my face and then use the toilet, all the while listening for other sounds—footsteps, breathing, anything. I’ll have to find toothpaste and a toothbrush, as well as clothes I can sleep in, if I’m stuck here any longer. I hope I don’t have to. Maybe I’m being a stupid optimist, but I hope this will be the only night I spend here.

Returning to the master bedroom, I run my hands over the sheets. I don’t feel anything like a snake or a rodent or a handsome, enigmatic, and infuriating man who seems like he shouldn’t be real and maybe isn’t.

I kick off my shoes, slide off my pants, climb into bed in just my men’s shirt and my underwear, and close my eyes. I can’t sleep. Of course.

I try every trick I know:

Think of something boring.

Think of something nice.

Count to one hundred.

Count backward from one hundred.

Curl on my side.

Lie on my stomach.

Flop on my back.

Twist. Turn. Flail.

I even hug Mr. Rabbit...but then I can’t remember when I moved him from the kitchen counter to the bed, and that makes me even more awake. I must have picked him up before the bathroom. I remember returning the mop...yes, I must have taken him then, though I don’t remember doing it.

I can’t relax. Every muscle feels as if it’s listening. I wait for a closet door to creak, for a window to break, for the front door to unlock, for the stairs to groan.

I wonder where Peter is. He must have returned to his apartment. Or gone to perch on more fence posts inside a dust storm, looking for more people like me. I wish he hadn’t left. He said he’d protect me, but I don’t feel at all protected. Eyes wide-open, I stare at the shadow of the dresser, the moonlit window, and the bedroom door.

The door creaks open. I freeze. My heart thuds louder. I don’t know what to do. All my waiting and listening and worrying, and I never planned what to do if anyone came in...

“Lauren?” It’s Claire. “Are you awake?”

“Yes.” I think I sound normal. I can still feel my heart race inside my rib cage. It’s as fast as the flutter of butterfly wings inside a trap. I think of the horror movie scene this would make: little angelic girl in a tattered pink princess dress, barefoot at midnight, knife in her hand. “Claire, out of curiosity, do you have your knife?”

“I left it with Prince Fluffernutter. He was scared.”

“Good. Can’t sleep, either?” I prop myself up onto my elbows. In the moonlight, her princess dress looks like it’s shimmery white, making her look ghostlike. Her face is in shadows, but I see the silhouette of strands of hair flying in all directions.

“It’s not that. I just thought you’d want to know that Peter is here.”

“Oh.” I process that information, trying to decide what it means that he came back. He wants to help me. He doesn’t hate me. Or he’s bored again and has nowhere else he wants to go. Or he plans to murder me in my sleep and display my head as a trophy on top of the eagle on the post office in the center of town... That last one seems unlikely. I decide I’m relieved that he’s back, whatever his intentions. “Thanks for telling me.”

“You’re welcome,” Claire says, always polite. “See you in the morning.”

“Good night.” I listen to her pad out of the room.

I lie awake a few minutes more, and then I dream of darkness and unfamiliar stars and my mother in a crisp, white hospital bed with calla lilies around her.