Dani said, “A quick sting. There. Okay, we’re in.”
Maud looked away from the tube filling with her blood, her palms sweating.
“Relax your fist now,” Dani said. When she pulled the needle out, Maud heard her make a sound, a soft moan. She looked up to see Dani with eyes brimming, her jaw locked tight, nose red at the tip.
“Sorry,” Dani said. “Just thinking.”
Maud said, “It’s okay.”
Dani turned away to wipe the tears. Maud couldn’t remember the last time Dani had met her eyes. Dani unwrapped a bandage and stuck it on Maud’s arm, her eyes still downturned. “You’re all set,” she said.
“Say hello to your mother for me,” Maud said.
Dani nodded, pulling off her latex gloves, her short hair swinging.
In the parking lot, Maud wolfed her sandwich, downed some water, stopped in the Juarezes’ bathroom, and then headed to Riverbend, working her way north in an east-to-west zigzag. She reapplied lip balm and sunblock. Cumulus clouds of the monsoon broiled to the east, cranking up the humidity. She tied a handkerchief around her neck to catch the sweat.
Finally, Maud parked at the end of Arrowhead, her last street. She opened the truck’s hatch. If a supervisor lurked anywhere, all he would see was her loading her satchel with her final stacks. He wouldn’t see her finger the mail for 125 and slide out the letter, leaving it in the tray.
At number 125, Maud didn’t turn up the driveway, but Laura opened the door and stepped onto the front porch, perhaps because she saw Maud coming. Maud hadn’t seen Laura in several days; in fact, she’d even left a note in the mailbox. Two days ago, the mail and the note were gone, so Maud hadn’t called the police to have them check on her.
Laura had thankfully replaced her lime-green foam visor with a wide-brimmed canvas hat, but she looked too thin, her shorts bagging to her knees. Divorce, Maud had guessed, or a death in the family, from the way she dragged herself around town in the heat. She had to be Jess’s age or thereabouts, thirty-five, thirty-six. They resembled each other a little, too, although Laura was fair-haired. After a moment, Maud realized she was standing still, staring at Laura.
“Nothing today!” Maud called, louder than usual, a flush at her neck.
Laura waved, smiling. She adjusted the water bottles strapped to her waist and pulled on the brim of her hat. If she said anything, Maud couldn’t hear it.
“Think it’s going to rain,” Maud called and waved back. She heard a voice she both knew and didn’t: You are here. She turned and looked behind her before she could stop herself.
It was after five by the time Maud swung her sedan into the driveway, a bag from the Patty Melt and her lunchbox with the letter tucked inside on the passenger seat. Her wet shoes squeaked on the brake. The sky had waited to unhinge until after she finished her route, a swift, furious deluge that flooded the station’s parking lot while she wrapped up her tasks for the day. The storm had let up, and the streets were nearly dry again as the water soaked into the parched earth, seeping into the aquifers below.
She turned off the engine and sat listening to the rain spatter on the hood, watching the steam curl up. The square stucco house looked the same as when she’d bought it in 1991. For years, her parents had wanted her to move home to Phoenix—Come home, Maudly. Honey, come home—but Maud stayed in Sycamore. In the same house. Same address, 825 Roadrunner Lane. Same phone number. Same good old car, now pushing 200,000 miles, thanks to Angie’s miracle working. She’d repainted the house, but in the same Navajo White. When the jacaranda near the breezeway died, she had planted another one. For better or worse, this was home. She could stay here and wait. She could do that much.
She climbed out, her shoes squishing on the driveway. At the mailbox, she held her breath as she pulled down the little metal door: bills, an ad mailer, nothing else.
Inside, Maud kicked off her soaked shoes and socks and changed into jeans, a T-shirt, and flip-flops, and then put the kettle on to boil. She ate her hamburger standing over the sink and then scarfed three of Esther’s cinnamon swirl bites. Sipping her soda, she unpacked her lunchbox and held the letter over the kettle’s steam until the flap lifted. Then she took the letter to Jess’s room.
Maud had left the room the same for a while. Around year six, she had taken down the music posters, filled the holes with spackle, and asked Rachel Fischer to help her paint the walls with a fresh coat of Garden Mint. She had bagged the clothes and books and photos and put them in the storage shed. After all, if—when—Jess came home, she would not be a teenager. She would be an adult, ready to move on to her own space. Maud had replaced the double bed with a burgundy twill sofa sleeper, adding throw pillows, an ottoman, and a small television and DVD player.
The one thing she had left the same was Jess’s desk, which had belonged to Maud when she was a girl and which sat as it always had under the window facing the street. A simple white cottage desk with three drawers and a hutch, where Jess had done her homework and written in her diaries—her notebooks, she’d called them. Plain black-and-white composition books, their sturdy covers held shut with rubber bands. After Gil Alvarez returned the notebooks, which he and the police had scoured for clues, Maud hadn’t packed them away, storing them instead in the lower desk drawer, along with the old answering machine. She pulled them out sometimes, reading them again even though she knew every word. Couldn’t stop knowing them. Two years’ worth, except the notebook from her last weeks, which she must have had with her.
She pulled one out now, pressing the spine open with the heel of her hand. She ran her finger over the pen and pencil marks, feeling the indentations. She skimmed the first entry, written the day they’d arrived.
January 1991
—So here we are. Sycamore, Arizona. God’s little slice of heaven. The whole place is about the size of five blocks of our old neighborhood. What in the name of all things holy was Mom THINKING? Tells me, We need a change, J-bird. Yeah, so schlep your only daughter to the flat-fuck middle of nowhere? GREAT idea.
Maud scanned to the end of the entry, to the poem whose stanzas slanted down the page.
Tonight you watched the universe
from the pavement
the sky so black
it howled
Or was that you?
You lifted your finger to find
your place in space
X marks the spot
You Are Here.
You: flat-backed
in the flat-fuck middle of nowhere
staring at a galactic heart
nestled in a nest of stars
Are: the verb to be
(or not to be)
Conjugate it:
I am
You are
She is
When will you finish the sentence,
fill in the blank?
Here: A new home
small and minty
with salted black hills
tiny speck on the pale blue dot
You are here
Dog-ear the page of yourself
don’t lose your place
For god’s sake
don’t disappear