way in, about my American passport—” here, Floss smiles, like isn’t the coast guard darling “—but I just answered all their questions, took the ticket, and said I’d deal with it later.”
“The ticket?” Orla says. “Floss, it’s a felony charge, crossing the border. You’re looking at jail time when you go back.”
“My daughter was missing,” Floss says. Marlow hears the possessive way she leans on the word. “I didn’t think about felony charges. I didn’t think about anything. I just tried to find her.”
It is the kind of line Marlow can imagine her mother saying for the camera, except the tone is off. Floss has a performance voice, and this—this isn’t it. She sounds exhausted, punched through by worry and adrenaline, and she looks the oldest she ever has. Suddenly, Marlow realizes it: Floss is not wearing makeup.
Orla looks around nervously. “You haven’t talked to anyone else here, have you?”
“No,” Floss says. Then she snaps her fingers. “Oh, there was a guy who told me how to get to your store. He wasn’t happy to hear that I came from California, but don’t worry. I paid him off.”
Orla’s mouth hangs open, but Marlow laughs—she’s not surprised. She thinks of herself, of her great lengths to get here: marching to Ventnor in the dark, sneaking over the border. Of course Floss had sailed right up to the wall. Of course she had forced her way in.
“Marlow,” Orla says. “Is she all right?”
Marlow looks over and sees that Floss is shrinking into a fog. Orla’s face is white. She isn’t used to seeing this. She doesn’t have fog, she says, and only knows a few people who do. It’s less common, in Atlantis. Giving up their screens when they came here seemed to save their minds just in time.
Orla says they should come up to her apartment. When Marlow helps Floss start walking, Orla hesitates. Then she takes Floss’s other arm.
* * *
Floss would like to know: Who is the dipshit who planned a red carpet on a boardwalk?
She is tripping every five seconds, despite the fact that Orla holds her on her left, and an assistant of Melissa’s is on her right.
She sees the bank of photographers coming up, all of them squawking at her: Over here.
She braces herself for the part when they yell at Orla to step aside. It always makes Floss uneasy, though she can’t quite work out why. To be the sole thing in the picture—isn’t it what she has worked so hard for? But she can never stand the sound of it: And now, Floss alone.
She is the talent, she reminds herself. She can do whatever she wants. This time, when Orla is told to move, Floss is going to hold on to her.
* * *
Orla knows that when she lets Marlow and Floss into her new home, it will be messy. It follows that, as soon as she and Kyle downsized, both of their sons came careening home, claiming a crisis each—the wrong job, the wrong girl.
Kyle was eager to unload the old house next door to her bookstore, to get into a smaller, newer place on the boardwalk. He trotted ahead of Orla, like an eager puppy, when they went to look at the old-person units.
“It’s in a former ballroom,” the realtor told them proudly, like Atlantis wasn’t lousy with those.
“You’re going to love the view,” Kyle promised Orla, and when they got into the unit, she did.
“But I said I want a two-bedroom,” she added.
Kyle danced over to the wall. He pulled a handle. A crinkled divider emerged, sealing the rest of the place off from a narrow space near the window.
“There you go,” he said. “Two-bedroom.”
Orla shook her head as Kyle struggled with the handle, trying to figure out how it clipped into the wall on the other side. “That doesn’t count,” she said.
* * *
The boys Orla introduces her to don’t get up until Orla tells them to, sharply. Marlow takes their hands, sweaty from holding their books open, in hers. They are handsome, with charming smiles that burst quickly across their faces, even when their mother is making them be polite. Marlow can feel the gulf between them, can remember how old thirty-five sounded when she was in her twenties. She can tell, too, that they don’t know who she is. Orla only tells them her name.
She thinks that they look nothing like her. Then Orla says, “They have our hair, too, but they’ve always worn it this way.” Frank