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Through downtown London, Sophie’s snug against Perry, Shauna beside her, the three of them waving Tiparillos and mouthing inaudible jokes. Perry drives fast and smooth, tobacco smoke rising in fat rings, his shoulders bobbing to the too-loud Earth, Wind & Fire cassette. Cold air streams from the windows back to Dina and Leon and me. Dina uncaps a bottle of apricot brandy; I hand out more Marlboros. We pass through the night-dark business district, the neon and flash of restaurants and bars farther on, the music loud enough to prevent conversation. We’re heading to a park they all know, and after we’ve passed the densest city traffic, Leon pulls a small wooden pipe and a film container out of his pocket. Hash.

The lead singer’s high tenor weaves through the steady, pounding beat of “September.” “I love this,” Dina says, rocking up against me. A swatch of Sophie’s hair falls over the seat, sways against the black leather. Leon passes the pipe to me, holds the lighter over the bowl while I inhale a light sweet stream of smoke. My body seems to fill with feathers. Dina takes the pipe, inhales, still rocking, and starts singing along to the tape. Her eyes close. Sophie’s voice mixes in, and then I feel a lifting, the silky speed of the car, my skin tingling. We begin to move through neighborhoods, the black night softened by snow clouds, snow on the ground, fuzzy rays of light from houses.

Everything becomes slinky – Debbie’s cashmere dress, the car, Dina’s husky voice, Sophie’s soprano, Perry’s hand slipping over Sophie’s neck. Leon lights another bowl, and Dina skips a chorus to ask Perry to stop for fast food. I watch the sunroof: streaks of white and yellow light, beyond them the quilted sky. The houses in this neighborhood seem as large as Sophie’s – perhaps it is her neighborhood – but I don’t recognize anything, not a street name or an intersection. Most of the houses are dark inside, as if they are empty, abandoned, as if the owners have vanished on yet darker streets, their bodies dissolving into particles of static. Above the sunroof, white spirals appear, puncturing space, circling a cartwheeling stick figure girl, her lines splitting off as she tumbles – an arm spinning away, a leg. White lines, yellow lines, chipped highway paint, the pink card for Laura, the man pawing my hand on the bus, tracts of weeds smashing into half-built houses. Get Well Soon. Dina elbows me and offers the apricot brandy, it’s wafting smell sickeningly sweet. I shake my head.

“What do you see?” she says, waving toward the window.

There’s nothing out there, I want to tell her, Do you realize?

“I don’t know,” I say, and lean back into the window, the sense of death thickening, the fear that something catastrophic is happening, then the sudden conviction of it. That yelling on the phone: hysteria before the shaking sets in. An overdose. A brain tumor. Laura shrouded, propped in a wheel chair, her head a white turban; Laura on some other abandoned street, dead animals in the trees, a scattering of ice, and my parents pacing the blank corridors of a hotel then shrinking away, smaller and smaller, the city evaporating with them in it, the land beyond, until the States is nothing but sky, London, Ontario, adrift in space.

“I have to go back,” I say.

“Back?” Dina says.

“Home. The hotel.”

Dina leans forward and whispers to Shauna, who turns down the music.

“Not yet,” Shauna calls over her shoulder. “We have an hour before anyone will start looking for us. Dina wants French fries.”

The car speeds on, the windows pressing in, impenetrable; my fingertips are slick with sweat, my breath fast and shallow. Perry lights another Tiparillo and turns down a wide boulevard, a road with no other traffic. I picture us spinning out, the BMW skidding on black ice, flipping over the median, bashing the row of blue spruce and speeding on, into a ditch, into a lake, into a field of straw-colored hypodermics, finally into the ocean of space that once was New York, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin.

“No,” I say. “I have to stop.”

Finally Sophie turns around. “What is it?”

“Yeah, what is it with her?” Perry says.

“I’m going to be sick.” I cover my mouth.

“Oh,” Shauna says.

“Uh oh,” Dina says.

“Poor Becca,” Sophie says, and reaches back to touch my forehead.

“I’m pulling over,” Perry says. “Right here.”

The car stops. I grab my handbag and stumble out, onto the snowy street, the cold seeping fast through my black suede heels. Air. Around me the sudden quiet of the sleeping neighborhood, the houses solid, the trees immense. I walk a few yards from the car, hold the collar of Debbie’s borrowed coat, bend over, pretend to gag. Stick my hand in the crusty snow then hold it to my face.

A few houses down, a light goes on. I straighten up, and the back door of the BMW opens for me, yawning panic and Tiparillo smoke. Shauna rolls down her window. “You finished? Come on.”

“You go ahead. “

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Shauna says.

“Really.”

She turns to Sophie, and Sophie leans out the window. “Come on, Becca.”

“Don’t be a suck,” Shauna says.

I walk away, picking over patches of ice to the shoveled stretches, the ruts from cars in the driveway, while Perry and Sophie call from the car. Snow melts through my off-black hose: ice-water down my ankles.

Finally Sophie gets out, stumbling. “What’s the matter? It’s freezing.”

“I have to go back.”

“But Perry doesn’t.”

I picture his hand on her neck, the fat padded fingers. Something snaps. “I can’t believe you like him,” I say. “I can’t believe this is what you like.”

“Nobody asked you,” she says, and she’s right. But flecks of light are still skittering, and the lawn seems like an island in space. She ought to know.

“I’m not getting back in the car,” I say.

“Sure you will,” Sophie says. “I’m getting back in the car and so are you. You have to.”

“I don’t have to do anything.”

“What do you think my Mom and Dad will do? You want me to go to boarding school?”

“She isn’t your Mom,” I say. “Her name is Helen.”

“Shut up,” Sophie says, her voice sharp, a stranger’s.

“Do you even remember your Mom?”

“Just shut up.” Sophie stares, pale, then flees to the car, which has already become toy-like and remote. My hands and arms are almost as distant, my shoes curiously blotched and misshapen. Monster feet. I take one step, another, farther from the car, over the flat spread of snow.

Perry beeps the horn. “Some American Princess,” he calls. “Get back here, princess.”

In my coat pocket, I find my last American $20; in the borrowed handbag, an array of Canadian bills. Enough for a cab. The BMW drives slowly behind me, until I turn up the walk of the house with lights on. Then Perry takes off, and Sophie is a blur of black sedan.
 

A woman answers the door of the brick house, a brunette with shoulder length hair, blue ink stains on her hands. Three little boys leapfrog around in their pajamas. I needed a taxi, I explain. “I had a fight with my boyfriend.” I gesture at the snow. The woman sizes me up, nods, calls, “Honey?” She leads me to a chair in the front hall. There are footsteps upstairs, a man’s voice calling the little boys. She brings me a glass of water. I tell her my name is
Debbie.

In a short while, the taxi drives up, bright and empty: a momentary surge of hope. A few snowflakes fall on the road, large ones that hit the windows just long enough for me to glimpse their structures before they melt. The interior smells of coffee and vinyl cleaner. There is no music. I give the driver Sophie’s home address, and he shrugs. At the end of the street, we turn, stop at a traffic light, drive five more blocks. Turn again. “Here we are,” the driver says.

I tell the Steinharts I’m exhausted and stressed.

Where is Sophie? They want to know.

“The hotel. With Shauna.”

Shauna and who else?

“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know people here.”

Once, when Laura and I were at an arts festival in Buffalo, an ordinary looking man began shouting the soliloquy from Hamlet.

“A street actor,” Laura said, but the crowd near him immediately thinned, and the artists whispered and shrugged. For several minutes we didn’t know if his performance was a planned or spontaneous outburst. I kept waiting for the point.

A guy in a festival staff T-shirt yelled, “Hey, could you do that someplace else?”

The man ignored him, reciting louder, enunciated lines. My stomach knotted and I relaxed only after a police officer arrived and escorted Hamlet to a patrol car.

“Pig,” Laura muttered. Then we bought slices of pizza and she let me try her cigarette.

At 2:00 in the morning Sophie returns, reeking of rum and cigars. I sit up in bed while she pulls her clothes off and drops them in a pile on the floor, her body startlingly white and pink and blonde, even her pubic hair blonde. She pulls the pink flannel nightgown on and climbs into the canopy bed. She won’t look at me. I lie back and gaze at the dimly lit ceiling, which breaks into delicate patterns. Sophie brushes her hair – brisk, drunken strokes.

“I’m sorry. What I said,” I tell her.

She keeps on brushing and turns off the light.
 

In the morning, Mr. Steinhart interrogates Sophie at breakfast. She stares, wretched, at her tea. “I’m sorry, Daddy,” she says. Her voice is quavery and penitent, but she won’t answer him. He says what every other Dad would say: Sorry isn’t good enough, this can’t happen again, he won’t have it, she’s grounded for a month. Then he announces he’s sending me home.

He waits, as if she’ll protest. As if that’s what he wants her to do.

“We were just going to read,” she says.

He sighs and leaves the room. Mrs. Steinhart pours us more orange juice.

“I know you’re not yourself,” Sophie tells me.

Of course, no one wants to explain to my parents – the Steinharts to admit there’s been a problem under their watch, me to admit anything. We agree my parents have enough to worry about, and when Mr. Steinhart calls the hotel, he tells my mother that Sophie has the flu: He’s afraid I’ll catch it, he’d prefer to send me home. Then he hands me the receiver.

“Sophie’s feeling pretty crummy,” I tell my mother. “How’s Laura?”

“I’m sorry about your visit.” Her voice sounds watered-down. “Etty can pick you up. I’ll be back tomorrow.”

“And Laura?”

“Soon,” my mother says.

“Soon what?”

“Have a good trip, sweetheart.”

Mrs. Steinhart puts me on a train: the mink again, the sunglasses. She checks to make sure I have my ticket and money, a note for Customs, my bag of snacks. She climbs on with me, claims a window seat, tells the conductor I’m traveling alone – could he keep an eye out? Mom things. The sorts of things Mrs. Steinhart does for Sophie, daily acts that keep Sophie afloat, prevent the shaking, that cap off Sophie’s grief and allow her the foolishness of pink nails and rabbit fur and Perry. At this moment, what I want most is for Helen Steinhart to ride with me on the train, escort me through Customs to Buffalo, to stay with me until we’ve found my parents sipping their percolated coffee, proclaiming Laura healthy, Laura herself at home, batiking in the laundry room, Richie and his friends creating baseball dynasties. Mrs. Steinhart gives me a quick hug, says goodbye, and waits on the platform until the train pulls out.

Heading east, I watch the flat snowy fields broaden and contract, thumb my novel. I try to sleep, which seems better than panicking, better than guessing what other freakishness and cruelty lurks inside me. Something ahead is dangerous, that much I believe. But in a few hours, I’ll cross the border, fish out my parents’ letter, tell the Customs officials I’ve been visiting a friend from summer camp – the words themselves a door to the maple woods and the lake and the cabins, that other me, that other Sophie. In a few hours, Etty and Richie will find me at the bus station, we’ll order pizza, we’ll watch TV. My parents will fly home. Soon.

After a month, my sister Laura moves back to Buffalo. The first time I see her again, she is bloated and strange: an imitation-Laura, skittish and white-faced, almost mute. We sit at the white formica table and I offer her things to eat, as if she’s a guest. She shakes her head at carrot soup. She shakes her head at pie. Finally, I stop offering. She glances around for my mother, who is deliberately busying herself on the other side of the kitchen.

“Becca’s glad you’re back,” my mother says, and I pull my chair closer to Laura.

“I missed you,” I say.

Laura gazes at me and chews at her lip, and I wonder if she’s going to cry, or worse, shake without crying. I don’t yet know her diagnosis, which will change and change again, as she visits different psych wards. I don’t know she’s lost her ability to read. Or that the Laura who resurfaces will for many years be a foreigner.

I know to mix lies in with the truth. It’s already becoming habit.

“I went up to Canada,” I tell her. “No place more beautiful.” 


Posted 01/01/09