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She had been out of prison for only a few weeks, enough time to settle back in the real world and be reunited with her scarf, though not her epaulets, when the scandal broke: a big corruption case in the major Delaware law firms, reaching all the way up to the governor’s office, even into the law schools’ deans’ offices, even into Philadelphia. An excited e-mail hit her inbox a few hours later: it’s time! The I-9 came by fax, then the W-4. She scanned pictures of her passport, renewed only a few days ago, and dutifully wrote a letter to her parole officer. “Sorry, I’m skipping town…” No. “I’ve been appointed full professor of law at the University of Delaware, and the dean has requested some strings be pulled…” “Due to arcane wizardry, my sentence is going to be commuted in time for the fall semester, and I’d like to thank you for…” She’d have to work on a second draft later.
That was three hours of her morning. Ema was already at work. She had left this morning eating the omelette Lana made for her off the Tupperware containing her lunch. Lana had already cleaned the apartment and the bathroom and the tops of the windows the day before, even bought new shower curtains with the periodic table printed on the inside to replace the scummy ones hanging in Ema’s bathtub. She had folded away the futon she was sleeping on, reconfigured the living room so it looked like no one was living there at all. In a way she knew this wasn’t her taking care of Ema. She had been dipping into the coffer of familial love for years, a box that was proving itself to be heartbreakingly bottomless. Still, after years of Ema resting her cheek on the backs of her folded fingers and moaning about the state she was living in, Lana felt pride at having cleaned this place up. Look at this, she felt like saying. It’s habitable, after all.
She was just heating up her lunch in the microwave when a knock came on the door. Her parole officer? That weasely man with the tiny nose and permanently pinged sense of dishonor? Was this even legal? She kept the apron on and got the door.
“I’ve left the stove on,” she said, a blatant lie so she’d have an excuse to force the officer out—ah, but it wasn’t him. It was a woman wearing a cheap black suit. Her hair was pulled up in a bun at the top of her head and she wore a familiar necklace around her neck, gaudier than the one she was familiar with by dint of the sheer number of magatama dangling from the cord. She was carrying a dingy cardboard box and had a bottle of wine shoved under one arm. By all counts she looked as though she should have been a small animal inside the box instead of someone capable of lifting it. Just looking at her inspired a kind of pity.
“Hi!” the woman said, her entire face brightening. “You don’t know me, but I’m Maya. You’re… Lana, right?”
“I am,” she said. She stepped out of the doorway. “Let me help you with that.”
She took the box from Maya and led her into the kitchen. It was lighter than she thought. The top of it was marked “kitchen” in familiar handwriting. Maya’s eyes moved slowly from room to room. She seemed to be evaluating something. Not Lana, but someone close to her. From the way she was staring at the coffee table, Lana could tell that whoever Maya was thinking of was coming up short.
“I’ve just started lunch,” she said. “Are you hungry? I don’t have any burgers or ramen, though.”
“You know who I am?” Maya said, taken aback. She seated herself at the kitchen table.
“You’re Mia’s sister,” she said. “Of course I do.” She didn’t add that it was the necklace that had given Maya away.
Maya scratched her cheek and looked off to the side, then smiled in a way that would have delighted Mia, but didn’t resemble her. “I’m glad she mentioned me.”
Lana put the leftovers in the microwave in front of Maya. She took out another few servings, stuck them in, and waited. At the table Maya dug into the stir-fry with gusto and no sense of self-consciousness. If only Ema ate her meals this way. Ema, who had grit her teeth and put on a cheery face during her teenage years, seemed determined to cash in her surly adolescence card in her twenties. Always waking up too late to sit down for breakfast, pecking at her dinner plate, and leaving bags of chocolate Snackoos everywhere.
“This is really good,” Maya said. “I wish Nick could cook as well as you.”
“That’s good to hear. It’s been a while since I’ve had a stove.”
“Oh… I’m sorry. You were in prison, weren’t you?” She looked at her empty bowl, then to the microwave. “I only found out about you when I went through Nick’s old case files. He asked me to clear some things out of his office a while ago. I took a nap on his couch and when I woke up she had left a note on the desk.”
The food was ready. Maya perked up again.
“How old are you now?” Lana said.
“Twenty-three!”
“You’re Ema’s age,” she said. “A year older.”
“I still haven’t met her yet,” Maya said. She was guarded when Lana brought the food to the table and sat down herself. She pushed the rice around, then ate again, slower. When their bowls were empty, Maya said, “I didn’t just come here to eat your food.”
“I know,” she said. “I appreciate you bringing over Mia’s things.”
“No, I mean… I’m a spirit medium. You know that?”
“Sorry?”
Maya bit her lip. She reached across the table and, unexpectedly, took Lana’s hands in hers. The contact shocked her—she had spent so much of her time in prison in either isolation or keeping a distance from the other women to avoid making any trouble. She smothered it down. Maya went on, “You’re going to think you’re crazy, but it’s not weird—well, it is weird. It’s what she wanted. And you won’t have much time, so don’t bother her by asking her what she’s doing here or how she’s here. I’ll explain it later. She’s been getting ready to go for ages but there’s always one last thing. You’re not holding her back, it’s just—it’s for her. So stay calm, okay?”
“Okay,” Lana said.
“I want you to open your box here,” she said, and now Lana could see the family resemblance in the way Maya squared her shoulders, the force of her request. “And not look up until you find it. Can you do that for me?”
“Okay,” she said again. Honestly, she was still recovering from that first shock. Maya released her hands. She had put the box on the floor, and now she went to get it. She put it on top of the table. She could see Maya in the hazy arch where her vision was obstructed by her eyelids and brow, a faint and serious black line impossible to ignore. She tried harder. She focused on opening the box. Her nails at first, since they were getting long: the tape stretched, but didn’t break. With her keys, except they were ancient and too blunt—she had asked Ema to get new keys made ages ago.
She sawed through it at last. Inside the box was nothing she could identify as hers immediately, although someone had helpfully put a set of old leather gloves and a Hello Kitty coin purse—hey! She knew she had left it behind—among the effects. But most of the box was taken up by old records. A Sublime album, one of the Beatles’ early works, one Oleta Adams, a few Stevie Wonders, but mostly artists she didn’t recognize, obscure and dated to the late eighties to the mid-nineties.
She continued flipping through the albums, caught in a death spiral of morbid fascination, when her fingers brushed against something in the bottom of the box. Soft. Cashmere, but lightly woven. A scarf. She knew what color it’d be before she lifted it out.
***
How old had they been when they found the records? Not teenagers at that point. Law school. Early twenties. Winter break. Her parents had been dead for months and Ema was off living with a distant aunt until Lana graduated in the spring. Mia had taken her to her hometown. Maya, Mia had said, was off at some training camp.
“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me to bring a coat,” Lana had said on the way up.
“You don’t need one,” Mia said. “It’s just as my aunt Muffy said! The vigor of the spirit lights a fire that wards against hypothermia, but not frostbite… or something.”
Someone was going to have to tell her that thinking outside the box didn’t mean ‘slaughtering idioms.’ “Muffy?”
“Morgan. Wow, this family really does have a naming problem. You know one of my aunts who married out of the family, her new name is Money Penny. Money Penny.”
The stay hadn’t been great. Mia’s aunt Morgan had just given birth to a screaming baby girl and their room was a single paper wall away. God, Lana didn’t miss that. She had practically been a teenager when Ema was born, and Ema had cried all the way through Lana’s high school years. She put a pillow against one ear and tried to finagle it so her other ear would be against Mia’s breasts. Mia pushed her away, claiming Lana made the bed ‘too hot.’ Too hot! There was no heating!
“I just don’t understand why Aunt Morgan said my old room was under renovation,” Mia said in the middle of their second night there, while Lana was discreetly trying to work her way closer to Mia. “I saw my room from the courtyard. There’s no work being done there right now. Who does construction in the winter?”
Mia was on her back, one hand beneath her head, the other bunched up in the futon. She had looked then, in an unknown room of her labyrinth manor complex lit by a waning moon, young and out of place. She had come back from the city in an outfit she had bought there with her girlfriend. Everyone else in the house floated around in robes that no doubt had been designed hundreds of years ago. All through dessert, Aunt Morgan had strongly suggested that they take advantage of Kurain hospitality and sleep in these comfortable woolen robes, not at all restrictive in any way… “Auntie, I’m from here,” Mia had said. She went to bed in one of Lana’s shirts and a pair of flannel pajama shorts she had stolen from an ex-boyfriend.
It hadn’t escaped Lana’s notice that there was not much of anything up here except that shrine. There was a ski resort with a lousy resort town on a nearby mountain. There was a nice fishing place on a different mountain. But here there was an occasional train, the last stop on the line, and a draft that never left. And there was the snow. There was no way to escape it. You either got out or died there, slowly icing over.
“We should break in,” Lana said.
Mia laughed. Then she put her face in the pillow to avoid waking up the baby. That only made her laugh harder. “Lana, you rascal!” She bit off her laughter, shook her head. “I don’t want Aunt Morgan to make things harder for Maya.”
“We could come back before morning.”
“I don’t know.”
Lana put her fingers on Mia’s hip. She drew a few light circles, then drew her hand back. “Too bad.”
Mia’s teeth rested against her lower lip. She patted the spot next to her, and Lana scrambled across the cold valley between their futons and beneath Mia’s covers. They kissed like a pair of spies in enemy territory until Lana gripped Mia’s waist too hard—Mia hadn’t done more than breathe loudly when the baby started off again.
Footsteps, heavy. Morgan’s hair had to be at least fifty pounds.
“I don’t care if she’s my cousin,” Mia said, drawing the covers up to her chin while Lana crawled back to her futon. “I’m never forgiving her for this.”
Low whispers, pacing. The crying gave way to hiccups; the hiccups to sleepy baby babbling. The baby was put back to bed. Then Morgan stepped out of the baby’s room and slid their door open. She stood there watching for a while longer, then closed the door and left.
“I can’t believe this!” Mia said, standing up. She pulled Lana to her feet. “I’m a grown woman—”
“Ssh!”
“—if Mom were here, I bet she’d…” She broke off. Then she took Lana by the hand. “Let’s go.”
Mia took her to a quiet, almost certainly unused section of the temple across the freezing courtyard barefoot. She found her old room as though guided there by magnetic force, and didn’t even bother unrolling the futon until Lana got sick of Mia’s freezing toes on her back.
“I’m going to hell,” Mia said as she hauled out the futon. “I shared this room with Maya for years.”
“Hell would be warmer.”
“You baby,” Mia said. Her cheeks were red and her breath heavy. The futon was ready. Lana nearly threw herself beneath the blankets, but Mia sat just outside the blankets, her legs folded beneath her. She pushed Lana’s hair away from her face. “You’re good at stonewalling people, but the second someone has your weak point, you fold.”
Now? Really? “That’s why it’s called a weak point,” Lana said. She put her hands on Mia’s thigh, and curled her fingers into the flesh. Mia shifted, opening her legs. The warmth and the scent were enough to make the whole odyssey across the courtyard worth it. Heat—she’d do just about anything for it.
“I think you could learn some resilience,” she said. But she didn’t fight when Lana tugged her forward.
Or did they have that conversation later after Lana had been partnered with Gant? It had been a long time ago. Something Mia had said back there had put Lana off. There was a time when she had turned those words in her head over and over again but now it had been smoothed off from its original time and floated from memory to memory, attaching itself to everything it could in one last effort to not be forgotten.
***
Back in the apartment, in the present day: Mia took the scarf from Lana's hands, and wrapped it around her neck. Lana stared.
"It's been a while," Mia said with a mischievous smile.
"It has," she said. She wasn't as surprised as she thought she’d be. It helped that Maya had warned her. She pinched herself anyway, just to be sure. "What are you doing here?"
"I wanted to say goodbye," Mia said.
How sad. She felt betrayed by Mia's death all over again. "Do you want something to drink? Coffee? Tea? I have wine."
"One last drink," Mia agreed. Lana took a moment to stare at the fridge. Red or white? She couldn't remember which one Mia preferred. In school it had always been 'whatever's not awful.' White, to go with the stir-fry they had finished. She poured the drink out, half-expecting that Mia might vanish before the wine filled the glasses, or when she passed the glass over, or when they took their first sips. Mia sighed and tossed her hair over her shoulders. "You're looking well for a woman fresh out of prison."
And you look good for a dead one. She had probably heard that one before. "There wasn't much to do in there. Except start studying for the Delaware bar." At Mia's confusion, she said, "The University of Delaware opened a law school a few years back. I was asked to join the faculty."
"Oh, Lana," Mia said. "Delaware?"
"They’ll commute my sentence. You've never been on parole," she said.
"That's true. You have other things to worry about."
"You must, as well. If you've stuck around this long."
"I'm waiting for my aunt to go first. I don't want her haunting anyone."
"Morgan? Or Money?"
"Morgan," Mia said. "Aunt Money remarried a guy named—ugh—Bill Dollar. So now she's Money Dollar."
That was awful. "At least she's marrying up." She filled their glasses again, though they were barely empty, and set the bottle aside. The box was still on the table. She set it down. "What did you want to talk about? Your sister made it sound important."
The mischief left. Devoid of that, Mia looked grave and serious, every bit the corpse. Her fingertips dug into her scarf. “I wanted to apologize for never figuring out what Gant was doing to you. I remember thinking on the phone that something was wrong. I should have asked.”
"I was being blackmailed. There's nothing you could have done. ... your protégé was helpful, though."
"You really know how to make a ghost feel dead."
“I'm sorry, but that's the truth. We hadn't been together for years by then, and it was a long time ago. I've already come to terms with it.” She looked into Mia's eyes. They were the right shape but the wrong color. Her hair, too, was subtly wrong, black instead of brown. If she focused, then she could almost make herself imagine that this was the real Mia in front of her; but the real Mia was a pile of ashes in a jar. Had been in that jar for years.
She put a hand over her eyes. When she looked back up, Mia was swirling the wine around her glass. She was bent over the desk, face pushed against her palm like a sighing Victorian heroine.
"I needed to hear that," Mia said. "Thank you.”
“How much longer do we have?” Lana said. Maya had made it sound like Mia, like the barest of candle flames, might burn out at any moment. But here she was, drinking as though she had simply taken a long vacation and came back with some plastic surgery and a new ‘do.
“It’s easier holding on when you aren’t trying to relay the same message you’ve been sending them for three years. ‘Think outside the box. Think. Outside. The box. Turn the tables. Don’t let the client see you stop smiling. Think. Outside. The. Box.” She shook her head. “It’s easier here with you.”
Lana poured them both more wine. “Oh?”
“My entire life—no. My whole career was about solving my family’s cases. One way or another, it always came back to my blood. It was the only thing that kept me going through school and the first few years on the job. But you made me realize I could have more than that. That there was a future beyond just the profession. I remembered that later with others.” She pushed her hair away from her face. Lana, unexpectedly, felt her chest tighten. Mia smiled and said, “How’s Ema?”
"Look at this apartment. Isn't it nice? She rents it herself."
"And makes you clean it!"
"I don’t have much to do here," she said. "She's a police detective like I was, so the hours are long. I don't think she's too happy about it. She's planning on taking the forensics investigator exam again the next time there's an opening. How's Maya?"
"She's doing all right. You can ask her when I check out." She said it so airily she might as well have been talking about a library book. She topped both of their glasses again and raised hers up. "A toast,” she said. “To better times."
***
They didn’t make it back to their guest room before daybreak. One of Mia’s uncle caught them trekking back to their rooms. Morgan was smirking all through breakfast.
After breakfast they went to roam the grounds around the town. Then, after passing the same broken vending machine twice, Mia said, “Want to see the waterfall we use to train new acolytes?”
“All right,” Lana said. Mia lent her a coat and some skis and off they went.
They almost didn’t make it there. Not because they had gotten lost, although they came close—“It’s been a while,” Mia said defensively, and hit Lana’s arm out of nervous reflex—but because the mountain threatened to come down on them. Halfway there Mia said, “Did you hear that?” and before Lana could even say, “What?” they heard a rumbling higher up.
They were already closer to the waterfall than they were to the outskirts of Kurain. Mia said she knew of a nearby cabin. They found it after a half hour of stomping around in the snow. The cabin was abandoned, littered with beer cans along the back. There was a dirty blue blanket crumpled in the corner, a box of records—they’d pick it up on their way back to Kurain, only to be dismayed by the lousy selection—and a stack of board games, all of them either Ouija, Scrabble, or Steel Samurai editions of Monopoly. They played Scrabble until the mountain stopped rumbling. A few minutes later they took off again for the waterfall.
“What was that?” Lana said once they were strapped back into their skis.
“Could’ve been an avalanche. Sometimes Aunt Morgan has these episodes where she just starts hitting the giant gongs in the back. Only ever seems to happen when I’ve left the house, though.”
Sounded like the crappiest homicide plot in California. Lana opted for the more temperate, “She doesn’t seem to like you very much.”
“I think I’m her favorite niece, actually,” she said, laughing awkwardly. “Between going off to law school and bringing you back with me. There are some issues in my family around firstborns.”
“That's so feudal!” she said, staggered. She didn't know people still did that, plotting the murders of the eldest's eldest.
“Tell me about it,” Mia said, and sighed.
***
"This one could be interesting," Mia said. They were drinking the bottle of wine Mia had brought over, a red that poured the sludgy color of congealed blood, and dug out Lana's old record player from the closet. Now they were sitting on Lana’s fold-out futon going through the box of records and trying to decide on an album to play.
"We have Stevie Wonder albums, and you want to play that?"
"Remember Professor Bel Curve? He ruined Stevie Wonder for me."
"I'm not having some hippie’s crappy album be the soundtrack to our goodbye."
"And I'm not having it be 'Signed, Sealed, Delivered!'"
In the end they wound up with putting on a terrible record from a folk duo called Soft Vultures. Morose, unmelodious warbling set to a backdrop of badly edited acoustic guitar thwapping. The singers repeated the chorus about a million times, growing more maudlin and pathetic with each repetition. She couldn’t remember the words—not that it mattered, when every song sounded like someone putting a baby to sleep.
“Well, I hope you’re happy,” Lana said.
“Are you happy?”
She picked up a couch cushion and held it to her chest. “Honestly,” she said. “No. I hate being dependent on Ema like this. I miss having things to do. And it’s impossible to get a date when your chief hobby is ‘reacclimating to the free world.’”
“Take it from a ghost. You’re still smoking even when you’re surly. That counts for a lot.”
“It’s all I could ever hope for.”
“It’ll get better when you’re in Delaware,” Mia said. “They didn’t offer you tenure, did they?”
“No.”
“Thank god,” Mia said. She held her hand out to Lana. Lana took it, let Mia move closer to her. “I’m going to miss you.”
“Are you going now?” she said. “I’m not dancing with you. You’ll have to switch albums for that.”
“How about one last kiss for the road?”
Her first instinct was to say no. She didn’t want this to end. It had been a cruel thing to come back. She was forgetting that there was a time limit to this after all, that Mia hadn’t come back so Lana could say goodbye. Mia had come back so she could fade away without regrets. The thought of Mia leaving for good—she bent her head, suddenly overwhelmed. “Damn it,” she said. “Give me a second.”
“Take your time,” Mia said.
The tannins on Mia’s lips were bitter, the taste of grape skins beneath that dry. She tried to remember the vintage of the wine, where it was from, all that from that glimpse of the bottle she got, but couldn’t think of anything else except being grateful for this chance. She’d never have this kind of closure with someone again. Not unless, she supposed, she pissed off some other Fey and had to banish their ghost. But this gentle caesura hurt, too. The poet tacking on one last couplet, and then spilling the ink.
“I’m going to put Maya back where she started,” Mia said. “I’ve already gotten her drunk. She’s such a lightweight, I thought Nick would have taught her how to drink by now.”
“Mia,” Lana said. Don’t drive your sister to alcoholism. She held her tongue. It was nearly time. She didn’t want to look at the clock. Partially because she was afraid they had blitz-quaffed their way through a short hour, but mostly because she was certain if she looked away Mia would disappear.
“She’s a crier,” Mia said. She eased herself into the chair. She took a deep breath. Then she buttoned up her blazer, unwound the scarf from her neck, and smiled. “Tell her I’m sorry for leaving her alone.”
And just like that, she was gone.
***
The wine was really doing a number on her now. She shut all the curtains and turned off the lights. Maya flung herself on Lana’s futon, bare feet flat on the ground and hair spread out on the bed. She shook her head when Lana brought her water and aspirin.
“I’m doing a special Kurain style hangover cure,” Maya said. “Ooommmmmm.”
“Maya, it isn’t working,” Lana said as patiently as she could. She wasn’t used to not extracting immediate obedience from her friends’ younger siblings. “Either you take it or I’ll force it down your throat.”
“Fine, Mom! Geeze.” She sat up and downed the aspirin and water. “I don’t think it’s working.”
“Give it an hour or two.”
“Ooommmmm—”
“Be quiet,” Lana said. When Maya’s face fell, she said, “Sorry. Keep going.”
“I guess I must seem pretty annoying to you, huh?” Maya said.
“I’m afraid I’m not… the warmest of people.”
“Oh, you’re like Miles,” Maya said. “Gruff on the outside, but huge Steel Samurai fan on the inside!”
“I’m tired of hearing about that show.”
“Sorry…!”
Lana sat on the futon a few feet from Maya. She studied Maya: the roundness in her face, the sheer wideness of her eyes. She looked utterly innocent. She had been held hostage by an assassin once. Surely that had conferred some kind of natural ability to endure, or at least implied truly godly levels of self-delusion—or was it just the way younger siblings took up the burden of loss when they were helpless, first going numb with shock, then shelling themselves away in some too-chipper version of themselves? For Maya, Mia could be there in occupancy, but never rendered before her without the help of a third party. Not gone, but never there. It must been like chasing after someone who had always just left the room.
“… I thought she had left for real already. The last time I heard from her was probably during that trial with Mom and Mr. Armando four years ago. But then I found that box and she reappeared, just to see you.”
“I’m sorry,” Lana said. “I know it must be hard on you.”
“No, no! I’m really happy she’s still watching over me,” Maya said. “I’m really happy. It’s just—you must’ve been important to her to spend so much time with you, but she never mentioned you to me. And I keep thinking… did I ever matter to her?”
“I don’t think I would have been the best person to discuss younger siblings in detail with. I was raising Ema back then. She was careful to keep my mind off the stress.” Maya seemed to crumple in the suit. Lana, concerned, said, “She loves you. You can’t doubt that.”
“If she loves me so much, then she would’ve…” She kicked her heel against the frame of the futon, then yelped in pain. She sniffed and brought her arm up to her nose—then she struggled to get the blazer off so she wouldn’t get any snot on it.
“Here,” Lana said. She unbuttoned the sleeve. Maya shot her a grateful look, then blotted tears out on her arm. When the tears kept happening, she said, “We had a lot of wine.”
“I’m sorry,” Maya said. “I’m sorry… It’s—you remind me so much of her. I mean, you remind me of who she might have been if I had gone to live with her. Oh no!” The tears came on harder. “I’m just so afraid,” she said, whimpering between words like an injured animal. “I’m so afraid that I was holding her back. That if she didn’t have to worry about me, if I hadn’t been there that night, she might have lived. Sometimes I feel like she only uses me as a rope to get to other people—I know it’s not true. But I didn’t want to tell her that to her face whenever Pearls channels her. She doesn’t need to spend her time here taking care of me. I’m an adult now—I can handle myself.”
Oh, Mia. Why did she let this happen? The first answer that came to mind was that Mia had forgotten about it—no. No. It had just been an extension of Mia’s character. Mia had never forgotten Maya, but she had transmuted Maya in her mind, turned her into someone who needed to be protected and shielded. Someone who was not yet ready when it was really Mia who wasn’t ready: not ready to live with the sister she had lived apart from for so long, not ready to blend Mia the lawyer with Mia the sister with Mia the person. As a ghost, Mia had become a guide and a beacon; but though a beacon shone bright, it shone from a cold, faraway place.
“I want to die,” Maya said. “If she won’t talk to me now, then I wish I could die.”
“Ssh,” Lana said. She slid next to Maya and hugged her. “Ssh. She loves you very much. There’s nothing to be sad about. You’ll be all right. It’s just the alcohol talking. You’ll be fine.”
And she was fine. She cried herself to sleep like a child. An hour later, she sprang out of bed, splashed her face in the kitchen sink, redid her bun, and happily accepted a Coke from Lana.
“You’re not as bad as I thought you’d be,” Maya said with a thoughtful expression.
“Excuse me?”
“Nothing!” she said. “I need to get back to the office now. Where did I put the bus schedule…”
“Let me walk you back.”
Maya rooted through her pockets until she found a crumpled piece of notebook paper. “I got it, don’t worry,” she said. “I’m practically an expert at taking public transportation thanks to Nick.” She bowed formally to Lana. “Thank you for taking care of me.”
“Wait,” Lana said. Maya already had her hand on the doorknob. She let go in a slow, uncertain way, like she thought Lana might try to kidnap her or put a gun to her head. Lana picked up Mia’s yellow scarf from the kitchen table and opened her hand to Maya.
Maya’s eyes went flat almost instantly. “I can’t. You gave this to her. It’s only fair that you get it back.”
“It’s rude to return a gift to the sender,” Lana said. “Besides, red is my signature color these days.”
“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you very much.”
“If you ever need anything, give me a call.”
“I will,” Maya said. She folded the scarf carefully, then tucked it into the pocket of the blazer. “But I mean it, okay? The next time we’re both in town, I’m going to pop by and eat more of your food. Yum.” She caught Lana’s eye and laughed. Then she left. Lana watched her go down the hall. Maya walked with her hand cupped around her pocket, as though to protect a small, pale flame. But even though her head was down and her shoulders hunched in, her feet moved with the sure briskness of the living.
***
The waterfall had frozen from the cold. Rows of white icicles hung in fringed layers, like the advancing waves of a shark’s teeth coming in. The pool at the very bottom was also frozen to a scruffy, opaque white. It was hard to gage the size of it: it had snowed recently, so the entire rock face was that same, unforgiving white. It could be twenty feet wide or it could be a hundred. Lana suspected that it was much smaller in the summer, but that didn’t change the majesty of it now.
“When I was little,” Mia said, “I had to meditate under there.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No. You see that flat, wide stone over there? They’d bring us around back then have us sit beneath it.” She drew her scarf, that pale flame, around her mouth and breathed in. “It seems so foreign to me now. I’ve already finished one semester of law school. This has nothing to do with the person I’m going to become.”
“That’s not true,” she said.
Mia turned to her, both eyebrows raised, mouth popping into a wordless ‘oh, really?’ Actually, Lana had thought the same thing last night. But by daylight Lana was a big sister girding herself to be a parent. This time next year she’d have Ema under her roof, the two of them living in the same town their parents had died in, pretending like this had always been the way things were between them. She hadn’t seen much of Ema since the accident, but she wanted to believe that she’d be okay, that these next few years would not be a disfiguring scar. Without meaning to, she had become an investor in the idea that each person had a bedrock, some buried part of them that would never change.
“I think,” Lana said, “that you’re like no one else I’ve ever met, and you wouldn’t be that person if you hadn’t come from here. No matter how silly or outmoded this place may be, this is still where your blood is.”
“No wonder we don't agree on constitutional law,” Mia said, puffing a few clouds of heated air through her scarf.
“Let’s not bring that up again.” She tugged the scarf down from Mia’s mouth, meaning to kiss her. Then the mountains rumbled again and a whole sheet of ice fell off the waterfall and smashed on the frozen pond below. Mia shrieked, laughing in surprise and a bit of fear. Another row of icicles toppled down, and another crashing down like they were trying to pull the sky down out of sheer rage—by the time they finished, Mia was laughing so hard that she was bent over on her knees with tears in her eyes.
“Oh my god,” she said. “I thought we were both going to die there!”
“Are you all right?” Lana said, helping her up. “Were you hurt?”
“Just surprised.” She looked up at the top of the waterfall. Her eyes went further up, to the pale blue sky, almost up to the sun. Then she grabbed Lana by the lapels and kissed her, hard and lingering—happy, in that moment, to have survived.