it isn’t. I thought I was just going to inherit a nice house and a little proof that my mom wasn’t so crazy after all. Just to get a little peace of mind, you know? To know that things could have been normal, or were once… that meant a lot when I came here. I just wanted things to be quiet for a minute or two.”
“Quiet? What do you mean?”
Mona sighs and rubs her eyes. She feels terribly tired. “Listen—you want some advice, Gracie?”
She shrugs.
Mona says, “Don’t get old.”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean don’t get old. The older you get, the more voices you get in the back of your head.” She taps her temple as if to rattle the squatters inhabiting it. “More invisible people telling you what you can and can’t do. And I guess I thought coming here would make that go away. Because I figured, if my mom might have been normal, then maybe I could be normal too. And maybe I…” She trails off.
“Maybe you what?” asks Gracie.
“Maybe I could have been a normal mom,” says Mona quietly. “The way my momma wasn’t for me.”
“What do you mean, could have been?” asks Gracie.
Mona doesn’t answer. There is a long silence.
“Oh,” says Gracie.
They walk on for a moment without speaking.
Gracie says, “I’m sorry.”
“You don’t need to be sorry. God knows you’ve got it rough as it is.” There’s a pause, and she asks: “You can’t get out, can you?”
“No,” says Gracie. “No one ever comes to Wink, but no one ever leaves it, either. It’s protected, he says.”
“It is. I’ve seen the”—Mona wonders what she should call it—“fence.”
“Yes. We’re here. So we have to make do.”
“You must wonder what it’s like outside it all the time.”
“Outside it?”
“Outside the fence. In the rest of the world. The real world, I guess.”
Gracie frowns, confused. “I don’t understand.”
“Like… outside of Wink. Where I’m from.”
Gracie’s pace slows. Then she stops, staring at her feet. “I guess I never thought about it,” she says in a small voice.
There is something frail and gleaming in her eyes, like her tear glands are just starting up. It takes Mona a while to understand. “You did know that there was something outside of Wink, right?” she asks.
Gracie bows her head. Then, without looking at Mona, she resumes walking ahead.
“You didn’t know?” asks Mona. She runs a bit to catch up with her. “You really didn’t know?”
“I knew,” she says defensively.
“Then why did you seem surprised?”
“Because… I guess I never thought about what it was like.”
“Are you serious?” says Mona, incredulous. “You never thought about it?”
“Stop.”
“Does anyone actually know? Or do you all think that Wink is just… it?”
“Stop it. All right? Just stop.”
“Christ!” Mona cannot believe it at first. But then she realizes she can, quite easily: the nature of geography, of direction in this place is so mixed up and bizarre that those who have lived in it for too long—or, in the case of Gracie, grown up in it—probably cannot conceive of the world as being another way. Mona’s seen their newspaper, which doesn’t report beyond the town’s boundaries, and their television stations show nothing but sitcom reruns from no later than 1985. These people have no idea what solid ground is like, what the twenty-first century is like, even. In a way, it is a perversion of the insularity of any small town: how many farm boys has Mona met who hadn’t ever spent a night away from home? Could they have conceived of metropolises and highways any better than poor Gracie could understand what the world is really like outside this tiny, warped bubble?
“Do you want to know about it?” asks Mona.
“No,” says Gracie angrily.
Mona is surprised into silence. After a while she hazards, “Why?”
“Because I’m not going to see it!” says Gracie. “I’m not going to get out of here, Mona! For me, for us in this town, this is it! This is what it is and it’s not going to change. Nothing in Wink really changes, not ever.”
“It’s changing now,” says Mona. “It’s changed since I got here.”
“Well, it won’t stick. You’ll leave too. And then it’ll be back to how it was.”
Mona wonders how true this is.
“I’m sorry, Gracie,” she says.
“Forget it,” says Gracie. “Just forget it. It’s better that way.” She sniffs and wipes her eyes.
Another twist of the canyon. Another precipitous decline. More gray walls and dusty gravel.
“What’s he going to do to me?” asks Mona.
“I don’t know,” says Gracie. “Maybe nothing.”
“And you can’t tell