of trees with every branch and needle covered in a delicate sheet of ice. The fog made it seem like they sprang up and frosted just for our eyes’ amusement. “It looks like Narnia,” she marveled.
The road through Black Hills National Forest wasn’t especially icy, but I steered around the sharp curves with overmuch caution anyway. My eyes kept darting away from the road to a series of small signs reading WHY DIE?—memorials for victims of fatal car crashes, I would learn later—which further elevated my sense of foreboding. The question called to mind a verse my mother referenced often. Cast away from you all your transgressions, whereby ye have transgressed; and make you a new heart and a new spirit: for why will ye die, O house of Israel? “Repent!” I could hear my mother say. “Why will ye die?!”
Twelve hours on the road had landed Grace and me here in Deadwood. My sister had wanted to go to a beach, but I was afraid to spend that kind of money. I thought we should find a destination that was less expensive and reachable by car, and I’d been drawn to Deadwood for several reasons. Its isolation and beauty. The fact that my brother Sam had been a fan of HBO’s television series by the same name. And though there was no chance of running into C.G. on this trip—his home was 400 miles away—some pathetic part of me was heartened at the prospect of sharing his beloved home state for a while. Having just learned about the home-sharing company Airbnb, I’d searched their website for “Deadwood” on a whim, and the very first hit had looked like destiny: the attic room of a huge, Victorian-era house set on a steep hillside in the city’s historic Presidential District, a long-term restoration project taken on by its owners, a young couple named Dustin and Laura Floyd. They were preparing to run their home as an inn. I liked the premise of Airbnb, but since I was a bit anxious about the reality of sleeping in the home of strangers, I looked them up on Google before our trip. The website of TDG Communications, a Deadwood marketing firm, listed Dustin as its co-owner and Laura as an administrator. Looking at their silly photos, biographies, and job titles—“benevolent overlord,” “administrative goddess”—I figured they were probably safe.
With the nose pointed down the steep incline, I threw my car into park and stepped out into the brisk afternoon, Grace following a second later. We opened the back end and stared past our visible breath for a beat: every inch of space had been filled with backpacks full of clothes, coats, boots, the comforter I’d slept with since sixth grade, Grace-approved foods like chips, bagels, and English muffins, and two hefty boxes full of books. Our heads snapped up as a petite young woman—just a few years older than me, I guessed, early thirties—suddenly appeared on the broad porch, descending the front steps with a warm “Hell-o! You must be Megan and Grace! I’m Laura, I’ll show you to your room!” She stepped carefully over the curbside mound of packed snow, paused at the overflowing trunk—“Does all this come inside?”—and grabbed the nearest box to lead the way to the attic.
The three of us maneuvered the contents of my vehicle through the cramped mudroom, past a small room with wood floors, up two flights of stairs that creaked with every step, and into the room I’d seen in the Airbnb photos: L-shaped with scuffed hardwood floors, two large windows overlooking the neighborhood, and steep rooflines that made constant vigilance essential: though twelve feet high at its center, the ceiling sloped precipitously downward until it was just four feet at the room’s edges.
Laura gave us a few pointers about the town, told us which way to go if we cared to wander around, and then left us to head back to the office. Grace and I stood in the attic in the midst of all the boxes, silent for a moment, assessing the space, planning. We spent the next couple of hours rearranging the room. We slid the queen-sized bed into the southeast corner, under the lowest part of the ceiling. Beneath the low slope on the west side, the boxes of books and empty suitcases. Clothes in the bureau. Dresses and cardigans on the little rack around the corner, next to a beige-colored door labeled—inexplicably and in sloppy blue marker across the top of the