the stable a few days after she went missing. I thought she was angry with me, that she’d left town to punish me. Escape for a while. I really thought she’d show up by the start of the semester.” He pauses, looks down at his hands. “Anyway, on my first trip home in the spring, I put it in the stall and wrote out the card. Just in case. I didn’t think anyone except Zoe would go looking there. But it was probably as much a reminder for me as it was an apology for her. Because I knew if she didn’t come home …”
For a moment, they’re both silent.
“And Tiana?” Martina finally asks.
“Yeah, that never really got off the ground. After Zoe disappeared, it just got complicated. And sad. We both felt pretty guilty.”
“I really am sorry,” Martina says after a minute.
Caden shrugs. “Apology accepted. I think we both have some regrets. I just wish I’d gotten the chance to apologize to Zoe.”
Martina stares down into her empty mug. A layer of milky foam lines the sides. “One more thing,” she says, looking up. “When I do put a final episode together, I want to include memories about Zoe, from the people closest to her. Is that something you’d be interested in doing?”
Caden smiles. “Sure. That’s the kind of interview about Zoe I’d be happy to do.”
“Thanks.” Martina smiles back, then glances at her phone. “I should get going. I’m kind of grounded for trespassing at your house last week.”
Caden laughs. “I think I’m going to stay and get a coffee. Take care, Jenkins.”
Martina pushes back from the table and slings her book bag over her shoulder. Then she sticks out her hand, because it feels like the right thing to do, and Caden takes it. “See you around.”
35 October
Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, NY
THE LIES STARTED the moment I was born. Now that I’m home, I spend my days cleaving truth from untruth, sorting memories into the times and places they belong. I’ve been talking to Mom, a lot, about my early childhood. After hearing her stories, seeing the photos she kept hidden, I’m getting better at it. This face belongs here, in this year. This event happened there. In the daylight, I’m beginning to understand. Everything that got jumbled is becoming unjumbled. I can hold one piece of memory up to the light, look at it, examine it without the other memories getting in the way, churning things into the messy concoction that scrambled my brain this summer.
But I can’t shake the dreams. At night, I dream I’m in Pathways, curled up on my cot. I dream I’m inside Windermere, surrounded by birds. I dream I’m in the stable, and it’s burning, and I’m burning with it.
It’s almost Halloween. In Bay Ridge, some of our neighbors have gone all out with their porch and lawn decorations, as they always do. There are full-scale scenes of witches and zombies, murder and mayhem. I don’t look too closely. When Mom sends me out to the store, the laundromat, to Duane Reade, I keep my eyes on the sidewalk, where the crisp browns of autumn leaves have begun to scatter. I wrap my scarf twice around my neck and button my denim jacket, relishing the chill in the air.
It’s autumn. I’m outside.
SUNY New Paltz let me defer my start until the spring semester, given the circumstances. My new leaf will have to wait a few months. But it’s okay. I’m home in Brooklyn. I’m free.
Today, I don’t have any specific errands on my agenda. I’m just walking, listening to the crunch of leaves beneath my feet, letting the familiarity of the houses and apartments I pass wash over me, letting the memories come.
* * *
This first one isn’t a memory so much as a story Mom should have told me a long time ago. She said it was her secret to keep, but I think she’s beginning to understand it was mine too.
Now that we can finally talk about it, Mom says she knew the second she had me. I wasn’t the daughter of her husband, John. I was the product of Mom’s on-again, off-again summertime affair with a mostly laid-back landscape architect with an occasional temper, who she’d met on one of many summer vacations to Herron Mills. Because we had been to Herron Mills—John wasn’t cheap, he just wasn’t a very good husband. He’d spend most of their vacations ignoring her, absorbed in his work, and eventually, she found George