I moved a little I could put my reflection there in the window with them: me in my Levi's and Billy Idol haircut. (I was the one with a head.) A friend of mine used to make bizarre collages like that-Nancy Reagan in mink among the slaves on an Egyptian mural; Malibu Barbie driving sled dogs in the Iditarod. She sold those things for good money.
The Hollywood Shop was flanked by Jonny's Breakfast (open all day) and the movie theater. Back behind these buildings ran the railroad tracks. On the other side of Jonny's were the State Line Bar and the Baptist Grocery. I tried to place myself inside these stores; I knew I'd been there. Directing Hallie through the grocery aisles on a Saturday, ticking off items from Doc Homer's list. Sitting in Jonny's afterward, hunched in a booth drinking forbidden Cokes, reverently eying the distant easy grace of the girls who had friends and mothers. But I couldn't see it. Those things didn't seem so much like actual memories as like things I might remember from a book I'd read more than once.
I had lied on the bus. I'd told the woman sitting next to me that I was a Canadian tourist and had never been to Grace. Sometimes I used to do that, tell tales on buses and airplanes-it passes the time. And people love you for it. They'll believe anything if you throw in enough detail. Once I spent a transatlantic flight telling a somber, attentive man about a medical procedure I'd helped develop in Paris, in which human cadavers could be injected with hormones to preserve their organs for transplant. I would be accepting a prestigious medical prize, the name of which I devised on the spot. The man seemed so impressed. He looked like my father.
I didn't do it anymore, I was more or less reformed. What I'd said that morning was the truest kind of lie, I guess, containing fear at its heart: I was a stranger to Grace. I'd stayed away fourteen years and in my gut I believe I was hoping that had changed: I would step off the bus and land smack in the middle of a sense of belonging. Ticker tape, apologies, the luxury of forgiveness, home at last. Grace would turn out to be the yardstick I'd been using to measure all other places, like the mysterious worn out photo that storybook orphans carry from place to place, never realizing till the end that it's really their home.
None of this happened. Grace looked like a language I didn't speak. And Emelina wasn't coming. I hefted up my suitcases and started to walk.
Oh Lord, the terror of beginnings. I dreaded having to see all the people who were going to say, "How long are you home for, honey?" Possibly they would know I'd come for the school year. We would all carry on as if this were the issue: the job. Not Doc Homer, who'd lately begun addressing his patients by the names of dead people. Since I really did need to come, I'd gotten myself hired to replace the high-school biology teacher who'd recently married and defected without warning. I had practically no teaching qualifications, I should add, and things like that get around. It's tough to break yourself as news to a town that already knows you. Grace formed its opinions of Hallie and me before we had permanent teeth. People here would remember our unreasonable height in seventh grade, and our unfortunate given names; our father actually named my sister Halimeda, which means "thinking of the sea," however reasonable a thing that might be to do in a desert. And my own name, Cosima, means something to the effect of "order in the cosmos" which is truly droll, given my employment history. I must have sensed the lack of cosmic order in my future, early on. Maneuvering for approval, I'd shortened it to Codi in the third grade, when Buffalo Bill and the Pony Express held favor with my would-be crowd.
Hallie was a more natural abbreviation, from the time she could walk people never called her anything but that, although Halimeda actually had some truth in it; she made you look for things beyond what you could see. I could imagine Doc Homer dreaming up these names, confident we'd both take noble courses. Suddenly I felt dragged down by emotions as I walked along, as if I'd swum out into a calm sea and encountered a