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“Persephone?” Ruben lifted his head. “John, you have to help her—Parker, give him room.”

Persephone could be mistaken for napping under moonlight if it weren’t for her shirt, soaked through with blood and ripped

in its center. And for the fact that her chest was still as stone.

Ruben didn’t believe in coincidences; he said everything meant something, and John had finally begun to believe it. And he

still believed it. Despite himself, he was still clinging to the hope that all this meant something.

Flashing red, blue, and white lights dashed over the field, streaking against the darkness like comets. The police were here,

all around.

“ Get out of the vehicle! You are surrounded. Get out of the vehicle with your hands raised. ”

Parker stroked Persephone’s face and sobbed her name.

“Hurry!” Ruben shouted. “Do what you did! You brought me back—”

“You brought Ruben back, man,” said Parker. “Do it for her! Do it, do it!”

But Ruben had been breathing. He’d struggled, but his heart had been beating. Life had still flowed through his veins.

“ Do it, goddamn you! ” Parker punched helplessly through John’s back, but John was already aligning himself with her body.

He waited. There was nothing.

Persephone, please. Energy breezed through him, from the ends of his toes to the tips of his fingers to the top of his head.

“The bleeding’s stopped!” said Ruben. “It’s working, John, it’s working!”

The energy, the light and joy and sadness and pain, dimmed like a flame extinguished. There was nothing left to give. He blinked

and the world was wet cement, cold and grey and without feature. From somewhere in the distance a small voice called his name. “ John! ”

Persephone. He couldn’t see her, but it was her voice.

“John!”

He blinked hard. Not Persephone’s voice, but Ruben’s.

“ John! ” Persephone?

“John!” Ruben.

Crumpled steel and shattered glass. Inside the upturned Cadillac on the grassy field.

Red and white and blue lights.

John pushed himself up and away from Persephone’s body and looked down.

“Why isn’t she moving yet?” Ruben studied her eyelashes, her nostrils. “I don’t think she’s breathing.”

No, this wasn’t right. John had felt it, felt the energy leave his body. Hadn’t it flowed into hers?

Bright beams tore into the wreckage. Voices boomed through the night.

“ Hands up! ”

Someone tugged at Persephone, but just before she slid from view, her eyes still closed: “John...”

A mere rasp, but enough to echo through the distance to be heard as clearly as if she were speaking directly into his ear.

He’d done it. Persephone was going to be OK.

35

He didn’t hear shouts to get on the ground, shouts to stop. He stood to his full height, his upper body emerging from the

vehicle’s undercarriage. There were no warnings for John, a Black man dark as the night sky above. There were only the flash-fires

from multiple guns, birthing violence into the night.

Ruben screamed for John, though he had to know John couldn’t be hurt, and the gunfire tore through the humid air even after

John stilled. He imagined himself falling. The brunt of the earth. The pricking of desiccated grass stabbing his right cheek.

The weight of a man’s knee as it bore down on his spine.

The barrier between real and unreal fell in on itself. Time, nonexistent.

A glint of metal, like the sun ricocheting off the surface of a valley lake, a snowcapped mountain range rising high above it.

John watched the white float past, right to left, an iceberg broken free from one of those glaciers in an idyllic mountain village.

Postcard perfect. Movie-set perfect. Persephone’s kind of perfect.

Persephone...

Beware of glaciers. Ruben’s first reading...

Not an iceberg.

A white sheet.

Fluttering past, draped over a slight frame, wheeled away...

“ FUNNYYYY! ” Parker’s wail...

All other details wiped out by a tsunami of pain, the resulting deluge flooding John’s mind, inundating his heart...

The need for escape, for survival...

Persephone and Ruben and Parker and the Cadillac and the field and Corpus Christi and Texas and America and the land and the

seas...

Gone.

36

The Pontiac pulls away from a drive-through window and makes its way to the edge of some main road. There is Sunday traffic,

which is to say, hardly any. Driving is an attractive, slightly overweight Black woman with warm brown skin, whose shoulder-length

hair is curled and set so that its crown floats above her head like a ball of candy floss. In the passenger seat sits a young

boy of fourteen, slurping a chocolate milkshake from a large paper cup. Sitting directly behind their mother is a younger

girl. She does some wavy thing with her hand which, while the same throwaway gesture might appear careless on another child,

is fluid and graceful.

The boy turns and the girl smiles, her teeth overly large and white and ridged in the way children’s teeth tend to be before they grow into them, before they’re filed smooth with time, though probably she will always have enviably larger-than-average, whiter-than-most teeth.

The girl, age twelve, already understands this and tends to smile wide, using her See Them from the Rafters teeth to great advantage.

The boy gives his sister a conspiratorial look and smiles with the straw still in his mouth, and their mother says, “Turn

around and face forward, Parker. And fix that seat belt.”

The girl drinks her strawberry shake and the boy turns and the car moves forward—

Only to jerk to a stop.

The boy reflexively squeezes his milkshake cup and the top flies off and the soft fabric seat, the black carpeted footwell,

and a great portion of his denim shorts are bathed in chocolate milkshake.

“I coulda made the light. She kept hesitating to turn and now I missed it. Girl, get off your cellphone and get a clue!” the

mother fusses as she rummages through a Wendy’s paper bag. She is too distracted to reverse the car from the street a few

feet. Instead she pulls out a thin stack of napkins, but of course they won’t be enough. She tries in vain to makes a grab

for other napkins that have fallen to the floor in the back, and her sandal slips from the brake and the car moves forward

another few feet before she can stop it again.

But it’s too late.

There’s the screeching of brakes as a cherry-red BMW rams into the side of the car. Persephone’s side. The air smells of hot

metal and burnt rubber and Neapolitan milkshake.

Mrs. Cross is alive. Parker is alive. Persephone, too, still breathes. But her hip feels as if it’s on fire. As the days stretch

ahead, they will learn that Persephone will never dance again. At least, not the way The Nutcracker or The Firebird or Swan Lake is meant to be danced. The one the hometown papers call the child prodigy is no more, and for the next several years gazes

of adulation will be replaced with self-conscious glances of pity.

But what of the young driver of the red BMW?

He is young; thirty-one. And just before he slams into the Crosses’ Pontiac, he is staring into his mobile and speeding down the near-empty road as he chews an American chip—he’s practically inhaled every french fry, and he’d ordered supersize; really, what do they put in these things?

He presses the screen to type an asterisk that will finally mark a task well done, steering the

car with his knee as he does so. The deal he crossed the Atlantic to discreetly fix will not only profit Northstar Oil greatly,

it will earn him the recognition he so desperately desires.

That a car sits in the middle of the intersection goes unnoticed.

Until it doesn’t.

The BMW slams into the Pontiac and spins it to the far left, and through the smoke a big-haired woman throws up her arms—she

looks angry, not hurt. Angry, not hurt! She’s all right, and there are no other passengers.

But he thinks he sees something in the back—

No, no, he’s mistaken—see there, there’s nothing back there.

There are no other passengers.

And there is no time.

The young man throws his car into reverse. The woman will be fine; he’ll have disappeared. It will be as if this never happened.

Which it must, because he wasn’t supposed to be here. This was his first opportunity, and he won’t let this incident ruin

things the way it has ruined the BMW’s red hood, which is horribly crumpled in front. He drives away. He never thought he’d

pull himself out from the legions of perpetual temps; he might’ve been unsure about his life’s direction, but he knew enough

to know forever temping wasn’t it. A secret liaison, a fixer in the business of oil. It’s a dubious business, but it isn’t

as if he’s directly hurting anyone. Holding court with foreign politicians and royals, debilitating the competition. Now that’s

something to write home about.

Not that he’s communicated with Amabel at all these last few years, yet another thing for which she, surely, abhors him.

But Amabel would have been so proud. For years he still smarted from her sending him away to that school in Maryland, which might as well have been another world even if it were only across a single ocean.

It’s taken him too long to forgive her, he knows that now.

But he promises himself he will finally call.

For the first couple of years of silence, he supposed he hadn’t called because he was still angry, and the part of himself that cared about not disappointing her acknowledged that anyway, he hadn’t made much of himself since leaving the orphanage.

More recently, he hasn’t called because it’s been so long since he’s called and he is ashamed.

Sometimes the only way one knows how to handle shameful things is to ignore them, to push them from sight and forget.

But I will call , he tells himself. Yes, I’ll call as soon as I return.

He repeats this as he races up the highway toward the airport. He thinks he hears ambulance sirens but of course sees nothing

and so realizes it’s all due to panic, and he says a small prayer of thanks to no Great Being in particular that neither he

nor the woman in the Pontiac were injured badly. At the airport, he parks the car in a predetermined location, as was instructed.

Apparently someone will handle it, clandestinely. Later, as his plane ascends, he gazes out at the flat spread of green, at

the water towers like two blue-grey eyes watching.

He looks away from the towers, tries to ignore them. The cyan water below is alluring enough, but he yearns for London fog

and hopes never to return to this scorching city again.

John closes his eyes and dreams of the ocean.

He is still dreaming when the cabin loses pressure and the plane dives beneath the waves.