see you as the family type.”
“Tried it once.”
“Didn’t take?”
“Something like that.”
“Ah,” says Carmen. She turns her black-glassed eyes to the sky. “Well, if anyone gives you any shit about that, you can tell them to go to hell for me. If they haven’t been there, they can’t talk.”
Mona tries to smile gratefully at this bracing advice. “So is this part of your property?”
“Kinda,” says Carmen. “Our house is back toward downtown more. This is just mine, really. I asked Hector for it. For my little bit of sun I could lay out in—though I did ask for a little bit of shade, occasionally—and he went and got all that arranged. That’s kind of how things work for us. A lot of favor-corralling, I guess you could say. I’ve no doubt you’ll figure it all out, if you hang around long enough.”
Mona looks around at the glen. Maybe it’s the gin, but it’s hard to have a troubling thought here. Yet there’s also something vaguely hermetic about this place, as if the trees have sealed them in and this tiny glen and its stunning vista are totally detached from Wink.
“Will you be hanging around?” asks Carmen.
“Sorry?”
“Around Wink. You’ve got a house, you said, but are you thinking to stay?”
“I don’t know,” says Mona. “Maybe. I guess the real estate market might not be exactly hopping here, if I want to sell the house.”
Carmen gives a husky laugh and finishes her drink. “You’d be surprised, m’dear.”
“I have to ask—you wouldn’t happen to have known my mother, would you?”
“Sorry, hon. I didn’t. Or if I did, I don’t remember, which ain’t out of the question. My memory isn’t what it used to be. But if you ever need anything—advice, or a drink—I’m always available. Or I’ll make myself available, even if I’m not.”
“I appreciate that.”
“Well, you seem like someone who’s seen a lot. It’s like I said, peace flourishes here, if you ask for it. I hope you’ll find some here.”
Mona considers it as she finishes her martini. As she does, there’s a snort from Carmen, followed by a second one that never quite stops until it’s a snore. Mona sits up and looks in the shaker, and is not surprised to see it is totally empty.
She gets up and follows the brook back up to the street, walking until she emerges in a greenbelt where three small girls play hide-and-seek, giggling and shrieking as they dash among the trees, and she turns toward home, thinking of peace.
So far Mona hasn’t had a single good night in Wink. She tries to sleep, but it does not come easily. Often she awakens to roam the house’s empty hallways. The windows cast queer shapes on the faded wooden floor, and in some places the air takes on a hot, electrical scent, like the smell in a room with too many copiers and printers going at once.
Mona thinks herself a practical person, so she knows the world abounds in coincidences that can really fuck with your head if you invest too much in them, and she tries to tell herself the shared date—of her mother’s suicide and the lightning storm—is one of them. Tragedies happen every day, and it doesn’t mean anything if two coincide. Yet each time she remembers that black, lacquered shard of wood leaning crookedly in the park, she is troubled.
When sleep finally takes her it is blessed and hard, a dreamless black slumber that will leave her covered in pink wrinkles from the sheets when she wakes. Yet eventually—it is hard to say when—she begins hearing voices in her sleep.
“… And she just came in the other night, she says,” says one voice. It sounds like it belongs to a very old woman who is standing just nearby.
“She says so because she did. I was there,” says another. This voice is masculine, firm and deep. “I was the first she came to.”
“To you? Was this your doing?”
“Her coming to me was purely coincidental. I had no hand in it. I had no idea she was coming at all.”
Mona does not open her eyes. She is sure she is dreaming, but she does not want to open her eyes in the dream, because then she might do the same in real life and wake up and ruin her sleep. So she lies on the mattress with her face in the sheets and her eyes tightly shut, listening to the two voices talk.
“And do you think it is all coincidence?” says the old woman’s