I never thought I’d stay in the place where I began. Life walks uncertain paths, always receding back upon the last, circling in memory until I am dizzy from the mere act of trying to belong. I’m not even certain what that means, if I’m honest. It’s hard to be sure of anything but the hawks wheeling above me, of the starved dogs with their tear-filled eyes and long rusted chains that fetter them to overgrown backyards. Of abandoned shops boarded-up never to reopen and a stone church burned from within to the ground. Some of the painted glass remains, sunken and swollen with bleeding color. I try not to look at it, to look anywhere else instead.
They never tell you that. They say that places are haunted, of course, but they never say how people are as well.
I used to have fond memories of this place, but now there is a sort of degeneration at work. The tired woman who works the flower stand, who pushed lilies and oleanders and white roses into my arms as a child, doesn’t recognize me now. The shops are closed, the windows shuttered like eyes. On the train tracks, we used to play games, Iris and Peter and Mark and Tom and me, breathless with the promise of oncoming death. I was always the last to jump. And I was always proud of that, of cheating death when life had seen fit to deal me such a poor hand already.
Now I live with my mother. I am twenty-three years old. Dad cut himself loose long ago, seeking a wild country that no longer exists. He sent me glossy smudged photographs of Arizona, of the wild bluffs of Idaho and Utah and the heartbreaking blue air of Colorado. He’s gambling himself to nothing, or so the drunks tell me. My mother doesn’t always see things clearly, either. Sometimes when I open the windows of her home, letting in a choke of gusty air, she tells me to stop. She says that she prefers the heat and the dark. She is sharp for an old woman, but sometimes she still forgets me, who I am, who we once were. I tie my light hair into a knot, rub cheap powder blush onto my sallow cheeks and try to apply a cat-eye with liquid eyeliner. I smudge it all away with the tap water, burning my eyes. “Mom,” I call then from the yellow bathroom, papered in eggshell white, the faucets creaking painfully, the sink always filled with struggling rusted water. “Mom.”
But she is the silence that doesn’t speak back.
Sometimes she tells me - in rare bouts of enthusiasm, of lucidity - that she can hear the ocean from where we used to live. A cottage on the coastal sea, heartbreakingly dark, where the storms unfurl low and everything always looked like death. The Pacific. The place where her dreams
slipped away. “Can you hear it, Olivia?” she asks, cupping her ear with one hand, “Can you hear the water?”
“Of course,” I lie.
*
It’s almost June now, and the night is laced with stars. I wish they were closer.
They’re supposed to return any day now: Peter, Tom, Iris. Naomi. Naomi, I think, Naomi. This is the name I can’t speak aloud. This is the girl I haven’t seen in two years, unless if you count the time she was taking the interstate down from the hills and stayed a night at my mother’s house. She curled herself against me in my narrow bed, my heart squeezing all the while, too stubborn to cry. She had a boyfriend then. She always had more than me, somehow, and it’s impossible to resent her for the things that I was never brave enough to take.
I wake the morning of their arrival before dawn, the wind knocking our shitty aluminum house, the black coffee scalding as I poured it into the chipped pan. Naomi had been in my dream. Or at least I think she had been: the ropes of blue-black hair, blank dark eyes like an animal’s, the wide cheekbones like a cat’s. Dream-Naomi even sat like my-Naomi, shoulders slumped, one slender leg over the other, a smile on her heart-shaped mouth. The scar along her cheek from when she’d stumbled as a child. She hadn’t gone to the doctor, so it had never healed. I used to run my fingertip along that scar. It was slim and perfect as a knife.
They were all fuck-ups, Naomi had once murmured to me in that hoarse and convincing liar’s voice. They were all hiding something, or running from who they used to be. Peter, Tom, Mark, Iris. Sooner or later we all flee from the things we have done. Sooner or later we all become someone else. I didn’t understand why she believed that we were the exception.
Now I say nothing, cow-licking back my pale blonde hair and watching on the porch for the people who I should have forgotten. Only one wouldn’t return, a face marked with a full mouth and thick profusion of dark hair, eyes flashing like the devil. Naomi told me that he’d shot himself in the back of his throat. Like Hemingway. Like a poet. Hence our meeting, this congregation of people who should never have agreed to gather once more in the first place. His name had been Mark. Naomi had loved him, I think. But so had I.
*
I don’t often miss the ocean, just as I don’t often miss my father. But I would like to see both of them again. The water’s impotent rage and my dad’s griefs so immense that he can’t even dare to speak around them. They’re caught still in the arc of his throat. This is the place where everything ends and everything begins, he told me. If could ask him one question it wouldn’t be why he left. It wouldn’t be why he never came back.
I would ask why he hadn’t taken us, too.
*
Now we gather in a ghost town. Mark killed himself in Chicago -- a state away, a world away. But somehow all things return to where they began. Iris comes first. She is prompt to a fault, windblown autumn-brown hair and finely tapered fingers, expression unfolding like a map. She wears the sort of shoes that men do when they go fishing; the pair of them look absurd on her tiny frame. When she comes to me it seems as if she’s too afraid to touch me, that if she touches me then I will disappear too. When my eyes go to hers I see the poison of tears in them, refracting all the light, and the line of her throat is trembling faintly. She won’t speak first, I see. She can’t.
“I’ve missed you,” I tell her, and she nods, and comes no closer. She sets her suitcase down on the scraped porch and kneels to say hello to my dog Argus, whose tail is wagging in gleeful bliss. And that’s when the tears come. She wraps her arms around Argus’ thick neck and Argus goes perfectly still, even when the whimpers turn to cries turn to sobs. They stay like that for a long time, really. As if Argus knows. As if they’re almost the same creature.
*
The others come just later, as if they’re a current of birds on the swoop, birds returning to the nested place where they once belonged. Clear beady eyes, the sweep of their sun-darkened arms like wings, nervousness palpable. Peter - he arrives first. Then Tom, the shadows underneath his eyes speaking of a tiredness that sleep would not fix. They are voiceless and silent, sitting in the patched sitting room with cold coffee and a package of uneaten pastries, as we wait for the girl who hadn’t wanted to come back at all. I can remember the phone call - the halts in her voice, the strange articulation - “Is it a good idea? For all of us to be together again?”
No, I remember thinking. It’s not.
Iris sits at the edge of the tartan sofa now, biting at her nails. Argus lays at her feet. “Naomi,” she says, in that soft sweet murmur, so sweet it makes my teeth ache - “She’s coming, isn’t she?”
There’s a knock at the door then, the sound of a hoarse low girl’s voice coming from just beyond it. “Olivia?” Another knock, a raspy laugh. “Are you going to leave me out here?”
None are how I remember them - but, somehow, I also know they are unchanged. Peter’s ink-stained hands and smell of smoke, Tom’s uneasy silences and darting fawn-dark eyes. Then I wonder if it’s not just the others who have remained the same, lost to those young golden summers forever. Maybe I am with them, and we are all still the children we used to be.
*
You can leave a place but it will never leave you. The train tracks through the heart of our little town, running underneath my skin - the winding staircase in the old bookstore, condemned and closed forever. The general store that sells fishing gear and shitty beer and almost nothing else. This is the place they’ve returned to, the place that never left them - I can see it in their eyes. Iris pities me for staying, I think, and Peter is baffled by my stubbornness. But I can’t explain what I don’t understand: how I am tied to this place, the way it is both flesh and marrow. I am locked here, to the winters that blaze and the summers that scorch, the tender springs that blossom too late and end too soon. I think of bloodletting, drawing the blade down the length of my arm, and letting the illness out. Anything to escape. Anything to abandon my mother and my life, to create anew. But I can’t. I am afraid that this place will follow me, that as far as I run I will always look back.
*