way to go.” Still, he felt a smidgen of pride. It had, he realized, been his first adult audience.
He stopped at the food store on the way home to buy a carton of milk. The ginger-haired girl on the checkout counter looked familiar, and her eyes were red-rimmed from crying. Her face was one big freckle.
“I know you,” said Shadow. “You’re—” And he was about to say the Alka-Seltzer girl, but bit it back and finished, “You’re Alison’s friend. From the bus. I hope she’s going to be okay.”
She sniffed and nodded. “Me too.” She blew her nose on a tissue, hard, and pushed it back into her sleeve.
Her badge said HI! I’M SOPHIE! ASK ME HOW YOU CAN LOSE 20 LBS. IN 30 DAYS!
“I spent today looking for her. No luck yet.”
Sophie nodded, blinked back tears. She waved the milk carton in front of a scanner and it chirped its price at them. Shadow passed her two dollars.
“I’m leaving this fucking town,” said the girl in a sudden, choked voice. “I’m going to live with my mom in Ashland. Alison’s gone. Sandy Olsen went last year. Jo Ming the year before that. What if it’s me next year?”
“I thought Sandy Olsen was taken by his father.”
“Yes,” said the girl, bitterly. “I’m sure he was. And Jo Ming went out to California, and Sarah Lindquist got lost on a trail hike and they never found her. Whatever. I want to go to Ashland.”
She took a deep breath and held it for a moment. Then she smiled at him. There was nothing insincere about that smile. It was just the smile of someone who knew that it was her job to smile when she gave someone their change, and as she put Shadow’s change and receipt into his hand she told him to have a nice day. Then she turned to the woman with the full shopping cart behind him and began to unload-and-scan. A boy no older than Sophie sauntered over to bag the groceries.
Shadow took his milk and drove away, past the gas station and the klunker on the ice, and over the bridge and home.
Coming to America
1778
There was a girl, and her uncle sold her, wrote Mr. Ibis in his perfect copperplate handwriting.
That is the tale; the rest is detail.
There are stories that are true, in which each individual’s tale is unique and tragic, and the worst of the tragedy is that we have heard it before, and we cannot allow ourselves to feel it too deeply. We build a shell around it like an oyster dealing with a painful particle of grit, coating it with smooth pearl layers in order to cope. This is how we walk and talk and function, day in, day out, immune to others’ pain and loss. If it were to touch us it would cripple us or make saints of us; but, for the most part, it does not touch us. We cannot allow it to.
Tonight, as you eat, reflect if you can: there are children starving in the world, starving in numbers larger than the mind can easily hold, up in the big numbers where an error of a million here, a million there, can be forgiven. It may be uncomfortable for you to reflect upon this or it may not, but still, you will eat.
There are accounts which, if we open our hearts to them, will cut us too deeply. Look—here is a good man, good by his own lights and the lights of his friends: he is faithful and true to his wife, he adores and lavishes attention on his little children, he cares about his country, he does his job punctiliously, as best he can. So, efficiently and good-naturedly, he exterminates Jews: he appreciates the music that plays in the background to pacify them; he advises the Jews not to forget their identification numbers as they go into the showers—many people, he tells them, forget their numbers, and take the wrong clothes, when they come out of the showers. This calms the Jews: there will be life, they assure themselves, after the showers. And they are wrong. Our man supervises the detail taking the bodies to the ovens; and if there is anything he feels bad about, it is that he still allows the gassing of vermin to affect him. Were he a truly good man, he knows, he would feel nothing but joy, as the earth is cleansed of its pests.
Leave him; he cuts too deep. He