On good days, she managed to get out into the garden. The hard part was getting past the front door. She would put her hand to the wood, and suddenly think, Have I got my gloves? And so she would check her coat pockets. Yes. She had her gloves. She would open the door a crack, think, Are my roots showing? and have to close it again, go to the bathroom and check her hair. And then she would have to stand by the door, breathing deep, telling herself it was only a few seconds on the street. Only a few seconds. Sometimes she hated herself for this fear. But then, if it was a good day, she would rip open the door in a rush and shut it and run down the steps, into the passageway, through the wooden gate that now had a new, shiny lock and a bolt she could push from the inside, and she would be safe.
Sometimes she spent hours in the garden, breaking concrete with a pick, hauling it into the barrow, sorting the bricks by hand into two piles: one to throw away, one to keep to make a raised flower bed. Many of the weeds she left alone. They had fought to be there; she wasn’t going to be the one to pull them out. Besides, they were green and growing, and most of them would flower in spring and summer.
Today she took a spade and started turning over the hard dirt. She leaned her weight into the spade, enjoying the way the steel bit into the black dirt, trying hard not to slice any worms.
Something rustled in the undergrowth by the west wall.
Lore went still. Listened. Nothing. She must have imagined it. She bent to her digging. Heard it again.
She put her spade down carefully, not wanting to startle whatever it was, but when she got near the tangle of weeds and dead wood and what looked like it might once have been a bicycle frame, there was a flurry of movement. She squatted down, peered under the foliage. An eye gleamed, and a tail lashed in the shadows. A cat.
They stared at each other. The cat was not pretty. Its ribs were showing, and one eye was closed, probably missing altogether. She could smell its breath, a thick, hot stink as though it had been chewing on dead things.
Lore backed away carefully. It needed feeding, that was obvious, but if she left now, would it ever come back? And if it did, did she really want the responsibility of caring for a verminous, ill animal? It was probably dying. And if she went inside to get food, she would have to come out again. Run the gauntlet twice in one day.
The cat was pushed as far back against the wall as it could get. It hissed, hissed again. Its upper right canine was missing. Maybe it was old, and had come here to die. It moved its head back and forth, looking for a way past Lore. She wondered what was in the kitchen that a cat might like to eat, and visions of the poor starved thing wolfing down cold rice, or scraps of two-day-old sushi or beans, trying to lick its whiskers afterward, made her sigh. Now she would have to feed it.
She brought out two saucers, one with raw egg, the other with defrosted ground veal. The cat was gone. She put the dishes down in the undergrowth anyway, and went back to her spade. She did not see the cat again that afternoon.
When it got dark, she went out one more time. The plates were empty. She smiled.
She watched the net but there was never anything about her kidnapping, no stories about bodies. Not surprising. She was old news: she had been taken at the end of August and it was now December. What was unusual was the absence of information about the van de Oests. Nothing. She scanned the business then environmental sections—still nothing. It did not make sense.
And then one day, on the news, there were her father and Tok, standing shoulder to shoulder by the fountain at Ratnapida. Tok, she noticed, was taller than her father now.
“We know she’s out there somewhere,” Oster was saying, “and we want her to come home.”
Tok, circles under his eyes and a broken air to his stance, nodded. “Please,” he said directly to the camera, “Lore, come home. It’s . . . Everything’s sorted out.” He