Nadine finally got her gaze past the sandaled man’s feet, up his long legs and blade-of-grass torso to his face.
“He’s sleeping.”
“Ask him if he wants a grilled cheese. And a chocolate milk.”
“Chocolate milk?”
“Come on. Do your stuff.”
“My stuff works better on awake people.”
“It works on everyone.”
“I do want a grilled cheese,” said the sandaled man, opening his eyes without lowering his feet from the table. “Yes I do.”
Instantly, Nadine felt herself switch on. As though she’d flipped a sign behind her eyes to read OPEN. That’s what the Collector always told her it looked like. It wasn’t conscious, simply what happened. And that, he’d assured her, is why it works.
“Am I having my sandwich with you?” said the man.
Dropping her bag to the floor and her coat over the back of the nearest wooden chair, Nadine sat. “See to the sandwiches, would you, dear?” she called over her shoulder.
The Collector laughed and moved off.
The sandaled man had removed his feet from the table and sat up, some. His threadbare button-down was too wide but not long enough for him, and hung off his shoulders more like a saddlebag than a shirt. The twiggy thing between his lips, which Nadine had taken first for a cigarette, turned out to be a twig.
“Now then,” she said brightly. “Why do you think we’re here?”
The Collector returned, pulled up a chair, sat listening a while, then interjected, “You’re like the Walking Woman.”
And Nartana stopped in mid-tale, blinked, and said, “Who?”
“Like that Mary Austin story. Do you know it? About the woman who wanders from all over the desert, and no one knows where—”
“Back in your box, dear,” Nadine said, patting his leg to quiet him. He quieted, smiling, while Nartana bubbled his chocolate milk with his straw. The bubbles rose to the rim of the glass and seemed to rotate there. For a moment, Nadine thought he was going to launch them like smoke rings, do tricks. The bubbles trembled with breath, then sank. When she looked up, she was surprised to find Nartana staring at her.
“You notice,” he said. Meaning what he’d done with the bubbles. Which had been a trick, after all.
“I do,” she told him. And so, before they’d even finished their sandwiches, she worked him around to his flutes.
This time, Nartana’s eyes widened comically. “You know about those?”
“We’ve heard about them.”
“Are they here?” said the Collector, leaning forward. He’d said nothing the whole rest of the time, just listened, with no trace of impatience. Actually, with the opposite of impatience. That his magic. “You have one with you?”
With a shrug, Nartana reached under the table and pulled up a clinking, canvas Trader Joe’s bag.
“Perfect,” said the Collector. “Oh, God.”
For a second, as Nartana struggled to free a recorder-like mouthpiece from whatever it was tangled with, Nadine thought he was about to play the whole bag, that the bag itself was the instrument. Trader Joe bagpipes. Then Nartana got a flute loose and set it on the table.
Together, they gazed at it. A cylindrical reed of something, warping almost apart in several places. The colorless feathers glued to the edges of the finger-holes looked filthy, caked with salt or gypsum sand, as though they’d been dragged behind a snowplow. The mouthpiece was pinched nearly shut, and bent forward just slightly, like a crooked finger.
“Can I hold it?” the Collector asked.
“Knock yourself out, man,” said Nartana.
The Collector held it, handed it to Nadine. How, exactly, it felt different than she’d expected, she would never be able to say. Softer? The feathers like fingernails brushing the bottoms of her wrists. Raising goosebumps there.
Nartana seemed pleased by their reaction. But when the Collector asked whether they could trade for or buy the flute—or commission the creation of a new one—the man raised both eyebrows.
“What do you mean?”
“We know a guy,” Nadine said. “He . . . well, he collects. Instruments. Handmade breath instruments, from all over the world. In honor of his wife.” And then—on impulse, and possibly improvising, because she wasn’t completely sure this was right—“She died.”
Nartana considered, then shook his head. “How can I give him my flute?” He sounded utterly sincere, and also as though they’d asked for one of his lungs. He put the instrument away. The Collector didn’t argue, just removed a card from his pocket and slid it across the table. “In case you change your mind. Ever.” He stood.
“Could you play for us?” Nadine said.
And Nartana looked up. And the Collector sat back down.
They still hadn’t spoken, fully two hours later, when the Collector turned the Jeep off Route 11 into the parking lot of a Family Pride supermarket that had materialized out of the blowing wisps of snow, lights blazing, like a frontier trading post. “I’m hungry,” he said. “Come on.”
As she eased into the air, Nadine felt both knees pop. She stretched next to the Jeep, listening to its sides snap in the wind, while snowflakes kissed her outstretched wrists. Disconcerting in their dryness. Even precipitation in this endless, greenless space seemed devoid of liquid, as unlike precipitation in her beloved Ireland as Nartana’s fluteplay was to pennywhistling. No less stirring or beautiful. But emptier. Even lonelier.
Theirs was almost the only car in the long, square lot. The new-risen moon poked a pinprick hole in the burl of heavy clouds. Far ahead, at the edge of some low hills, a ribbon of light, or maybe lights, stretched the whole length of the horizon. A town, perhaps. From under the front tire of the Jeep—as though it had been there for hours—a tortoise-shell cat crept out, looked at Nadine with narrowed green eyes, and scurried away. Two more cats she hadn’t seen seemed to rise out of the asphalt to join the first, and they glided off together toward the store.
“Hello,” chirped a tiny, dark-haired girl in a Family Pride apron, passing in front of the Jeep wheeling a stray shopping cart. Whatever that horizon light was, it flickered in her too-large glasses.
“Uh-uh-uh OH!” sang another girl Nadine hadn’t noticed, chugging up behind the Jeep, steering a whole line of shopping carts.
The first girl laughed, spun her cart around so she was pushing from the wrong side, and raced toward the oncoming line. The collision produced a strangely disappointing ping, but the girls staggered back as though from a car crash, then leapt into the air and butt-bumped each other. Scream-singing “Hello!”
Nadine smiled. Stopped smiling. Watched a snowcloud blow over the girls. Neither one, she realized, was as young as she’d initially thought. The first had to be in her twenties, dark braid thumping down her back, glasses clearly the cheapest she could find, the prescription probably at least a year out of date judging by her squint. The second was taller, pale-cheeked, round and squishy everywhere like an uncooked loaf of bread. Her eyelids not just heavy but set in their heaviness, like a new mom’s.
Nadine had known so many of these girls back home in County Clare. Woman-girls who could have gotten away, gone to school, gone to Dublin or London, maybe meant to, but stayed instead to help parents or wait on a boy. And gotten stuck, without realizing. Without even noticing, sometimes. And then spent the rest of their youths wriggling like flies on flypaper.
“Nadine!” called the Collector, standing before the open sliding doors. “They have cactus candy!” He disappeared through another knot of cats into the market.
“It’s gross,” said the round woman, pushing her carts past Nadine. “Don’t do it.”
“Tastes like cactus, though,” called the woman with the braid. Glasses twinkling.
“And belly lint,” said the round woman.
Nadine laughed.
Inside, opening her coat but finding less warmth than she’d hoped, she strolled past closed checkout lanes and a trio of
black kittens clustered around a plastic saucer of milk next to the stacked firewood. In the Express Lane, a cashier sat behind the register. Pretty, dusky, Hispanic girl, maybe nineteen, with tired eyes that made her appear almost Asian and a red, glinting mouth, pursed and just a touch lopsided. Kisser’s mouth, Nadine thought. Homegrown-tomato mouth.
“Buenas noches, welcome to Family Pride,” the cashier said, without looking up from the Pauline Kael paperback she had propped against the vegetable scale beside the register.
Smiling without knowing why, Nadine strolled ahead, searching for the Collector. She passed more wandering cats, a few stray shoppers, a drunk guy in a Stetson picking through boxes of sale-priced Cheerios. In the Health and Beauty aisle, she saw another Family Pride employee kneeling to restock tampon boxes along a bottom shelf. This woman actually looked up when Nadine passed. She’d affixed wrapped, taped-together tampons behind each ear, and they bobbed like antennae as she straightened.
“Those,” Nadine said, with what she hoped was proper reverence, “are exquisite.”
“And you haven’t even seen my spatulas,” said the woman, and returned to her stocking.
By the time Nadine located the Collector, he’d paid and was on his way out of the store. She caught up as they traversed the lot, and he offered her a candy out of a bag with a painted cactus on it. She took his elbow instead of the candy, and they walked in silence back to the Jeep through the spitting snow. He held her flap open for her, as he occasionally thought to, took too long making his way to his own side, then stood with his own flap unzipped. Any heat left in the cabin streamed out, and the chill poured in. A long, gray tabby hopped in, too, sat in the driver’s seat as though preparing to take the wheel, then hopped down again.
“Like Scott himself, he looked,” Nadine finally intoned, in her best BBC documentary voice. “Frozen to the side of his Jeep. His beautiful, brilliant companion frozen inside. One turn of the key from safety, warmth, civilization . . . ”
The Collector dropped into his seat, keyed the ignition, and turned on the car. Then he turned it off again, while wind battered the canvas and the chill chased down their bones.
“What?” Nadine said, following his gaze but seeing only the woman with the braid, hunched over, burrowing to the far corner of the lot to collect a cart that had wandered all the way to the barrier.
“Nothing,” said the Collector. Not starting the car. He wiped the windshield free of breath.
Nadine waited. Sure it would be worth it, though she had no idea what it was. As usual.
Eventually, he turned, his face unreadable. His posture even more stiff than usual. As though he really had frozen. “It’s just that I know a collection when I see one,” he said.
Then he slid through the flap and set out across the lot.
She was too surprised to follow, and too cold. So she just watched as he went, popping another cactus candy in his mouth. His clothes whipped around his stick-figure frame. He stopped a few feet from the girl, not helping with the cart. The girl spoke to him. When the conversation showed no signs of abating, Nadine clambered out and made her way to them. Airborne snow danced along her scalp and neck like little fingers, tickling and teasing. And freezing.
The girl was laughing as she removed her glasses and wiped them on the edge of the sweater sticking out under her coat. The Collector just stood, his smile for show, not his real smile. Nowhere near.
“So. What time do you get off?” Nadine heard him say, and stopped. The question startled her, despite the fact that she knew better.
The girl’s answer got swallowed by the wind, but the Collector said, “Uh-huh. And what time did you come on?”
The girl started to answer that, too, laughing some more. Then she stopped laughing. Put her glasses on, but not before Nadine got a good look. And saw.
The person in there. The woman-girl. Panicking. Without making a sound.
Almost casually, never disengaging his gaze from the girl’s, the Collector lifted his foot and kicked the cart toward the edge of the lot. It bumped against the curb.
“Stop,” the girl said.
“Hey,” said Nadine. “You’re freaking her out.”
The Collector moved to the cart. Popping it up on two wheels, he shoved it over the curb onto the gravel shoulder of the road on the other side. Then he went over the curb himself and pushed the cart just a little farther away. Right to the edge of the asphalt.
When Nadine looked at the girl, she was stunned to see tears streaming down her cheeks. “I’m from Juarez,” she said abruptly.
“Honey, it’s all right,” said Nadine, moving to her side. “He’s . . . I don’t know what he’s doing. But he won’t hurt you. He’s never hurt anyone.”
“That isn’t true,” said the Collector.
Nadine whirled on him. “What’s wrong with you? Stop torturing this poor—”
“Come on,” said the Collector to the crying girl, gesturing at the cart. “Go get it.”
Wind whistled past, dry as dust, heavy as breath. The girl from Juarez just stood and wept.
“Okay,” he said. “I guess I better talk to the manager.”
“Oh, God, you can’t do that,” the girl breathed.
“For fuck’s sake,” said Nadine, “what’s wrong with you? I’ll get it.” Letting go of the crying girl’s arm, she moved for the cart. The sensation didn’t seize her until she’d reached the curb, had her foot off the ground and halfway over. And when it hit—like the yank of a leash, but inside, around her esophagus and also her hips, not painful, not strangling, but permanent, impermeable, as inescapable as her own skin—Nadine gasped in surprise. And glanced up at the Collector. Who looked even more surprised. Only then did she get scared.
“What is this?” she said.
He didn’t answer. Her fear intensified. She tried starting over the curb again, realized she’d never make it, stumbled back.
“It’s not so bad,” said the girl with the braid, stepping forward. Taking Nadine’s hand. Tears freezing on her wind-whipped cheeks like the tracks of something that had just raced past. Footprints in desert sand. “Really, it isn’t.”
The Collector looked at them both. Abruptly, he grabbed Nadine around the waist, as though he were going to sling her over his shoulder and break for the Jeep.
But the girl clamped tiny fingers around both of their arms. Squeezed hard. “Don’t,” she whispered. She glanced toward the market, then down at her feet, where the gray tabby who’d jumped into the Jeep twined about her ankles.
Nadine felt the Collector let go. He caught her eyes, but not for long enough so she could see what he was thinking.
“Right,” he said. “Be right back.”
“What?” Nadine snapped.
But he’d moved away, returning to the Jeep without turning around. And the girl with the braid was pulling Nadine gently across the lot toward the market, where the register woman had just emerged through the sliding doors. She had her book in one hand, a freshly lit cigarette in the other. Perching against the frost-caked front window, she settled into a cloud of her own breath, staring past Nadine and the braid-girl at the empty road. The pinprick moon.
Nadine felt herself start to panic. Or—no, not panic—which frightened her even more, because it made even less sense. “You can’t be serious,” she called to the Collector. And then, “You’re leaving me here?”
Stroking her arm, the braid-girl left her by the open sliding doors. The warmth from inside and the cold out here met on her skin, shooting shivers through her. In disbelief, she watched the Collector close himself into the Jeep, start the motor, and drive off into the night.
Later, and forever afterward, when she thought of those days—only six, the Collector assured her, and the longest of his life, though sometimes she suspected he was lying, that it had taken him much longer—Nadine would try to remember if she’d ever actually seen the Doña. Certainly, she remembered the cats. Dozens of them, their claws clattering ov
er the linoleum as they chased each other down the aisles. Their head-bumps and purrs whenever any of the women who worked at the market knelt or sat to stock or just sit. Their very occasional, quiet meowing at the front windows, almost always just at dawn. Sometimes, even now, Nadine believed she could perfectly recall—could sketch from memory—every single one of their faces. Their whisker-twitches. Their eyes that glowed, radiated, overflowed.
Of course she remembered the women, too. Their faces, though she couldn’t recall a single one of their names. Had she ever learned their names? Had she told them hers? Had she known hers?
She wasn’t sure. But the braided girl had proven right. The days themselves weren’t bad. In fact—and this was the worst, the scariest thing of all—they’d rung with laughter. With broom hockey games played with margarine stick-pucks, and tiniest-bubble-blowing contests using Free-Affix, the worst-tasting gum on Earth. With murmured, sleepaway-camp conversations while they all sat with their backs against the dairy cooler, the chill like the shock of diving into a snowdrift moments after fleeing an overheated house. Purifying, somehow. The conversations about nothing: proper ingredients for fry-bread, and how accordions sound over distant gunfire; the first times they’d tasted Yoo-hoo, and the stupidity of Stetsons; their far-away moms.
Did they eat? Sleep? Where had they slept? Nadine didn’t know, didn’t want to. What she did remember, could not get away from, was that feeling. That sense that every single moment had been suffused with a sensation she’d forgotten she’d ever felt, and so hadn’t been able to identify at the time. A specific sort of effortlessness. A restlessness so old and familiar and permanent, it felt like peace.
As though she’d been sucked all the way across the Atlantic and landed on her backside in the middle of the Burren, then hiked from there to the sea, where she’d made her way along the cliffs to Doolin. All of this in the company of her sisters. If she’d had sisters.
As though she’d wandered up the mud-riven road between the hills to the cabin of her childhood and found her mother still living, just standing there waiting for her.
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