Margot Singer, featured in the new Ocean State Review

The Boys

Just past two a.m., a frigid February night—Sam startled out of sleep. She gasped. The darkness swam. Beside her, Zeke slept, a long lump beneath the quilt, turned the other way. The dogs curled on the floor below, asleep. The baseboard radiators ticked. Still, something had shaken her awake. 

She got out of bed and went over to the window. The old wooden frame was drafty, the panes opaque with frost. A polar vortex, the weatherman had called it. On the map, a magenta swirl stretched down from the Arctic like a giant hand. She breathed a hole. The street below was silent. The sky was pocked with stars. 

And then she saw him. Running down the street. Running right down the middle of the empty street, along the yellow line. Running toward her, as if she’d summoned him out of her dream in the act of waking, as if she’d drawn him to her line of sight. He wasn’t wearing a coat or a hat, not even a sweater, just a button-up shirt and jeans. He ran beneath her window and kept on running, arms pumping, breath condensing, like an animal bolting free. 

—Hey! she said out loud. She rapped on the glass. 

Zeke lifted his head and squinted. He looked old in the dim light of two a.m., his cheeks gray with stubble, his eyes creased. He reminded her of her father, at the end. Even though her father was young, too young, not yet even fifty, younger then than she and Zeke were now. 

—What, Zeke mumbled. 

—Some guy—some kid— just ran past the house! He didn’t have a coat on or anything.

He was just running, right down the middle— Zeke pushed himself up on one elbow. 

—You sure?

Of course she was sure. She glanced back out the window. Her heart was still knocking in her chest. The streetlight shed a sallow light. The road was empty, gray with salt, the curbs crusted with a rind of ice. It was a small town. A college town. The boy could easily be somebody they knew, a student or a local kid, one of Zeke’s players, one of Jack’s old high school friends. 

—Something’s wrong, she said. I feel it. I think we should call the police. 

—The police? Zeke frowned. 

—It’s, like, ten below zero, she said. Thirty-below wind chill. It’s two in the morning.

Nobody has any business being out there like that on a night like this! 

—The cops won’t do anything, Zeke said. Running’s not a crime. 

—We can’t do nothing.  

—There’s nothing to be done.

—But Zeke.

—Come on now back to bed.

She folded her arms, tucking her hands into her armpits. She was freezing. She eyed the clock. How far could he have gone in, what, three minutes? Four? By the time she got out there—maybe ten? He’d been heading away from campus, out of town. There was the golf course, a couple blocks of old houses, the newer subdivision, then open fields. She could get dressed right now and go out to look for him. She could bring the dogs. 

—I really think we should call the police, she said. 

—Come back to bed, Sam. It’s the middle of the goddamn night. 

He turned over and pulled the quilt over his head.

The old dog stood up and shook, tags clinking, then turned and settled. Her feet were blocks of ice. Probably Zeke was right. Probably the boy lived out that way. Running warmed you up; she was being stupid. Probably he was fine.

She slid back under the covers and pulled her feet beneath her nightgown. She knew she would not sleep. She lay listening to the ticking baseboards, turning the image over in her head. The boy’s pumping arms, his curly hair, his great white clouds of breath. 

And then a wave of pressure slammed into her chest, like the impact of a blast. And she knew, right then, the boy was dead. 

~

Sam was one of three girls—Willa, Samantha, and Sydney—whom their father, longing for a son, nicknamed Billie, Sam, and Sid. Three little brown-eyed girls just like their mother. Her father complained in his gruff, good-natured way. He took Sam and her sisters camping, taught them how to pitch a tent and build a fire, tie a fly, catch and pitch. Her sisters whined and dragged their feet, and soon turned to other, girlier things—piano lessons, ballet, boys—but Sam continued to get up early with their father to go fishing, played catch with him when he came home from work, rode bikes with him around the lake. She liked the feeling of her body in motion, the wind in her face, the strain of exertion in her lungs and limbs. She liked her father’s smoky work shirts and his scratchy cheeks. Their easy silences. The way he made her feel special. For those short hours, he was hers and she was his. 

It was funny, in a way, that after growing up in that family of girls, she’d spent the rest of her life with men. First Zeke, then Zeke and Jack. The players on Zeke’s teams. Jack’s gang of grade school friends. The men over at the college Service Department where she worked: the construction managers and custodians, the landscaping crews and safety officers, the heating and chilling plant engineers. She got on with guys. She knew how to talk the talk, to fend off the BS. Lately, though, she found herself longing for the company of women. Sometimes she wished they’d had a another kid. A girl. A daughter might have understood.

She and Zeke were one of those mismatched couples that proved the old cliché, opposites attract. He was six foot six and she was five foot two; the top of her head barely reached the middle of his chest. He was dark and she was light. She was lively, quick to flare; he was grounded as a stump. She’d once thought it made them complementary: yin and yang, interlocking parts. But over thirty-two years, like forking tree limbs, they’d grown both together and apart. Every little thing about him was familiar: the way he blinked when he got angry, the catch of the calluses along his palms, the constellations of moles across his back. Everything, that is, except the truth of him. Of course, she could say the same thing about herself. 

~

The Missing Person Bulletin went out at three p.m. the following afternoon. Their cell phones buzzed, the landline rang, her email chirped. Emergency Alert. The police were trying to locate a missing student. Age 21, 5’11”, 180 lbs., blue eyes, brown hair. A senior at the college. Last seen leaving Dooley’s Pub in town at approximately 2 am that morning, wearing a blue shirt and jeans. 

Zeke was on the phone with the AD. The kid had been a kicker on the football team, though he’d quit the team the year before. His roommates had called Security at noon to say he wasn’t in his room, hadn’t come back that night. Search parties had already been sent out. 

—Go on, tell them, Sam said when Zeke hung up. Tell them that I saw him run right past our window. Tell them that you refused to do jack shit!

Zeke blinked but said nothing. He pulled on his hat and coat and left. 

It was still just six degrees out, the malevolent air still revolving in the troposphere, the wind still edged with ice. She bundled up and clipped the leashes on the dogs and went and knocked on Cindy’s door, three houses down. 

—I need you to come with me, she said. 

Cindy came clomping out in a puffy parka and Carhartt pants. Cindy took care of the dogs when Zeke and Sam went down to Florida to see Zeke’s folks. Sam called her their fairy dog mother. She was an emergency room tech, sturdy as a plank. She bent down and gave the dogs a treat. 

Cindy hadn’t heard the news, had been sound asleep at two a.m. 

— I bet he’s holed up nice and cozy in some girl’s bed, she said.

—I hope, Sam said. 

But he wasn’t with a girl, she knew. 

They walked east, away from town, in the direction the boy went. They squinted into the impotent sunlight. The wind knifed their skin. Sam pulled her fingers out of her gloves and scrunched her fists. Her toes were already going numb. 

They walked for nearly a mile, beyond the golf course and the subdivisions to the beginning of the stubble fields, and then they crossed the street and headed back. No one else was out. Sam scanned the frozen yards and shuttered houses. What were they looking for? 

But then the dogs put their noses down and started pulling. Sam stopped and looked around. They were standing by a driveway that led back to a wood-frame house half-hidden by a stand of pines. The driveway was un-ploughed. Snow still covered the front steps. Nobody was home. But the dogs were straining in that direction, as if they knew. 

And then she saw the footprints in the crusted snow, leading toward the house. Not back.  —Oh crap, Cindy said. 

Sam would have thought that she’d throw up, or faint, the way people do in movies when they find a body, but she just stood there, looking. The expression on the dead boy’s face reminded her of Jack’s when he was little, when she’d go in to check on him to make sure he was still breathing, in the middle of the night. A child’s deep, untroubled sleep.

Cindy knelt and pulled off her glove with her teeth and pressed her fingers to the dead boy’s neck. Then she took her phone out of her pocket and dialed 911. 

~

—He must’ve been drunk, Cindy said, afterwards. 

She set a mug of hot tea in front of Sam. 

—Must’ve ran the wrong way out of Dooley’s by mistake. Lay down, passed out. Cold like this, you go hypothermic quick. 

—I knew I should have called the cops, Sam said. 

She had started shaking, as if the cold had only got through to the inside of her body then.

She picked up the mug and looked at it and set it down again. 

Cindy touched her shoulder. 

—Can I get you a blanket? A shot of whiskey in your tea?

Sam pulled her feet up and hugged her knees into her chest and shook her head. 

—I should have gone out after him. I shouldn’t have let Zeke talk me out of it. I knew. 

—Quit it. There’s no way you could have known.

But she didknow. She’d felt it. That was the trouble. 

—It’s a quick way to go, at least, Cindy said, gently. You don’t feel any pain. 

Sam wondered how Cindy did it. Every day, all day, in the emergency room, dealing with the sick and injured, the pain and fear. Sam pictured gurneys, windowless fluorescent hallways, bleeping monitors, little curtained cubicles. Sam had only been in a hospital twice: once when she gave birth to Jack, once with her dad. She didn’t like to think about that, the last time she saw her father, immobile in a web of IV lines and tubes, his face sunken and drawn. Visiting hours had ended, and she and her mother and sisters had squeezed his unresponsive hands and kissed his forehead and left for home, where they’d sat around the kitchen table, drinking tea, just like she and Cindy were doing now. They’d known the end was near, or could be, and yet there they were, oblivious or in denial, jabbering on like that, while he lay there in that awful room, alone. As his damaged heart gave out. The phone had rung, just after midnight, the duty nurse calling to say that he was gone. Gone. She remembered thinking, gone where? 

And now, that dead boy in the snow, as if asleep. 

~

The campus mourned. The townspeople joined in. Flags were lowered to half mast, the chapel bells tolled. Counselors were on standby for those struggling with grief. At dusk, people gathered for a candlelight vigil outside the Presbyterian church. A few of his football teammates spoke.

The dead boy had been a good kid, a volunteer at the food pantry, a communications major. There had been no warning signs. Everyone was shocked. At work, they bent over the newspaper in the dispatch office. The bartender at Dooley’s was quoted as saying he’d stopped serving the kid after his fourth drink. The kid’s buddies were quoted as saying they’d tried to make him go home with them, but he refused to leave. On social media, people tossed around the blame. It was the third recorded case of death by hypothermia in the state that week. 

Sam didn’t attend the vigil or go to the campus service a week later. She didn’t join the gossip around the dispatch desk at work. She didn’t talk to Zeke. He knew her well enough to leave her alone. The conference tournament was approaching, anyway, and he had away games twice a week. He left early, came home late. Her anger simmered and foamed. Within days, the temperature rose back up into the forties, and the ice melted into mud, as if the cold snap had never happened. She took the dogs on long walks out on the gravel roads to the south of town, alone. 

What she felt, thrumming beneath the guilt, was a selfish, stupid feeling of relief. She knew she had been spared. For now, at least. 

As she walked, she tried to picture Jack down in Mexico in his rusty van, surfboards strapped to the roof, parked by some beach in Ensenada or Puerto Escondido or San Blas. The winter sun, the sand, the waves. Jack was living the life, everybody said. She said it herself, all the time. Lucky Jack, she said. 

Her phone was in her pocket. She could try to call him now. She could message him on

WhatsApp. But she did not. 

She missed Jack less than she missed the past, she told herself. She missed the feeling that she was doing something useful and important in taking care of him, in being his mom. She missed the smoothness of his baby skin, his milky breath, his little-boy hugs. The closeness they’d had then: the three of them, a family. She missed her former self.  

The dogs pulled. She picked up the pace. Bare branches stretched like ganglia across the cloudy sky. The ground was scabbed with leaves. Her middle-aged knees ached. And now here was this dead boy, messing with her head.

~

The next time, it was August. She was in the den at the computer, finishing a last glass of wine. It was late. Zeke had already gone up to bed, and she was tired, but she knew she wouldn’t be able to fall sleep. She used to be able to sleep through anything, just like she used to think that no longer getting her period, no longer having to worry about getting pregnant, would be a huge relief. Instead she was hostage to her hormones—to the prickling flushes, insomnia, drained libido, mood swings. The change of life: her mother’s prissy phrase. Half the people in the world went through it, but no one ever said a word. No one even called it by its name. 

Through the open windows, the cicadas’ saw-buzz rose and fell. She sipped her wine, scrolling through social media. She’d long ago unfriended everyone whose politics she found objectionable, leaving her with an endless stream of photographs of happy smiling people, silly drinks, unappetizing meals, vases full of flowers, stupid cats. Why did they imagine anyone would give a shit? Cindy, she saw, had posted a birthday fundraiser for a nonprofit dedicated to saving endangered species. There was a sad picture of a polar bear standing all alone on a broken floe of ice. She clicked “like.” 

She felt, at moments like this, as if the skin of the world had been peeled back, revealing the bare machinery that was grinding all around them, the flywheels and belts and gears and pulleys, pulling everybody in. Reality might be plastered over with a screen of hype, but just

below the surface lay nothing but cruelty, greed, and fear. Everyone was fighting for power.

There was nothing you could do about it. It caught you up and sucked you in. 

And then it hit her, just as on that night of the polar vortex, six months before. That same detonation in her chest. That same thudding jolt behind her ribs. That same blast wave of pain. 

Adrenaline pinned her limbs. She wondered if she was having a heart attack. She’d heard that the symptoms were different for women, that even doctors often missed the signs. Probably she should dial 911, or at least call out to Zeke. But she didn’t move. A car rumbled by and voices rose, and laughter, as a group of people walked past out on the street. 

She stood up and went into the kitchen and drank a glass of water. She swiveled her neck, raised arms above her head. She took a few deep breaths. She felt okay, she decided. Her chest still ached a bit, but her pulse had settled. Probably she’d just had too much to drink. 

She was already upstairs in the bathroom when she heard the sirens—that keening wail that the dogs always howled along with, as if the emergency vehicles were their long-lost pack. The sirens dopplered and faded, and she knew then that the pain she’d felt was not a heart attack, and that another boy was dead.

~

In the morning, she heard Zeke get up and take the dogs out. She heard the screen door bang when they came back in. The bedroom was already bright. She could still feel a faint ache in her body, a residue of pain radiating in the air. She lay on her back and looked up at the thick beam that braced the roof. It was bad feng shui, she knew, for a beam to cut through the space above your marriage bed. 

The stair treads creaked. Zeke was standing above her. 

—Are you okay? he said. 

He seemed even taller than he already was, looking down at her like that, a crease between his brows. 

—I guess so. 

—You’re not feeling well? 

—I’m just tired, she said. Though maybe she was sick. It was hard to tell. 

—It’s not like you to sleep this late.

The dogs poked their wet noses at her face. Zeke sat down on the edge of the bed. After a moment, he slid his callused hand beneath her nightgown and rubbed her back. 

He had not touched her like that in a long time, she realized, and she began to weep. 

~

It was hit and skip. A boy on a bike. Dead on impact. Just a couple of miles up the road on Wheeler Hill. 

She spread the newspaper out on the kitchen counter. A witness said the car must have been going at least fifty down the hill when it veered, for no apparent reason, onto the berm. The victim was 23, a local kid, cycling home after his shift waiting tables at the Red Fox Inn. Sam didn’t recognize the name. He’d been wearing a dark hoodie. No helmet. No lights. 

Zeke was making himself a cup of coffee, carefully pouring hot water from his special skinny-spouted kettle around the filter’s edge. He looked up. 

—What?  

Words swarmed in Sam’s head. They were the wrong words. 

—I heard the sirens, she said finally. I knew. The other night. 

The cops had picked the driver up a little while later, she read. A 45-year-old electrician with a suspended license and a history of DUIs. The place where the accident had happened was an ordinary road, an ordinary hill. She’d probably driven up and down it a hundred times. Jack used to ride his bike that way all the time when he was a kid.

Survived by his mother, the article said. 

If anything ever happened to Jack, Sam knew that she would not survive. That would be her end. 

She went out to walk the dogs with Cindy after work. It was hot, the summer sun a flat white disc burning through the late afternoon haze. They walked along the bike path in the shade, letting the old dog take his time, letting the younger dog pee and sniff. The woods beside the path were cross-hatched with dead trees: spindly ash and locust, hickory and beech. The trunks lay where they had fallen, decomposing slowly on the bed of leaves. People, too, were dying all the time. If they were all left lying where they fell, Sam wondered, how many bodies would there be? 

—You should go see someone, Cindy said. 

Sam had told her about the chest pain, though she’d kept the part about the dead boy to

herself. 

—I don’t know, Sam said. 

—Seriously, girlfriend, it could be A-fib. You don’t want to have a stroke!

Sam took a breath and let it out. She thought of her father, pinned down by tubes and wires, his face sagging and gray. Half her life had passed since then. 

Cindy jabbed her with an elbow. 

—Don’t be an ostrich, Sam, she said. 

~

Sam made an appointment for a physical. The doctor had her wear a Holter monitor for 48 hours, an annoying box that hung around her neck, five electrodes taped to her chest. But the two days were uneventful, and the results came back normal. The nurse gave her a referral to psychotherapy. They could get her in to see someone in a couple weeks. 

—I’m not going, she said to Zeke. 

Her sister Sydney was married to a shrink, a former Dead Head who still smoked too much weed. He called everybody dude. His eyes were always red.

—It’s not like you’re going to be seeing him, Zeke said. 

Sam refilled her wine glass and turned back to the computer. She was scrolling through

Jack’s Instagram. His posts were mostly photographs of waves. Frothy breaks and glassy barrels. Waves at dawn, waves in the rain. Waves dotted with surfers. Waves framed by the rear windows of the van. She was searching for a glimpse of Jack: the back of his head, his bare feet, his shadow in the sun. 

—You need to talk to someone, Zeke insisted. 

Jack’s posts were still lives without stories. All she had to go on were the hashtags: #vanlife, #surfing, #getoutthere, #incredible. But she wanted to see him, to know that he was putting on his sunscreen, steering clear of stingrays and rip currents and sharks, keeping warm at night. She clicked on a photo of a scruffy brown dog standing on a surfboard. It had 87 likes. It pissed her off. What was so incredible about that? 

—Look at this, she said to Zeke. Do you think he got a dog? 

Zeke came over but didn’t look at the screen. Instead, he picked up the wine bottle and pushed in the cork. 

—Sam, you’re drinking too much, you’re not sleeping, you’re angry all the time. I don’t know what’s going on, but I know you, and something’s up. Just make the goddamn appointment.

She resented it when he used his coach’s voice on her, even when she knew that he was

right. 

—Screw you. My chest hurts, not my head.

Zeke blinked. He stood there, holding the wine bottle. 

—You don’t have to go through whatever this is all on your own, you know. I’m here.

I’m only trying to help. 

—I know, she said. But she felt he was about as far away as he could get. 

~

The therapist was a heavy older woman with a smoker’s rasp and red lipstick—not what Sam had in mind at all. She had Sam complete a lengthy questionnaire, listened impassively to her story, then recommended antidepressants and 50-minute sessions twice a week.  

—We’ll just go with a low dose, to start. We’ll see how it goes. We can always adjust.

We, we, we. The therapist’s consulting room was filled with clocks. There was a round wall clock, a digital clock set on the bookshelf, an alarm clock on the side table by the couch, a gold carriage clock on a heavy wooden desk. They all read 1:47 p.m. Sam wondered how often they had to be synchronized. Her session time was nearly up. Sam cleared her throat. 

—So do you think I’m crazy? That this is all in my head? 

The therapist clasped her hands in her ample lap and laced her fingers together. It reminded Sam of the game she’d liked to play with Jack when he was little. 

Here is the church, here is the steeple. 

She liked to keep her fingers on top of her knuckles, the way the shrink’s were now, instead of folding them underneath, so that the church was always empty when she pulled back her thumbs.  

—Are you concerned that I don’t believe you? the therapist said.

Open the doors and see all the people. 

Her empty palms and wiggling fingers made Jack laugh, every time. They’re up on the roof, sunbathing! he always said. 

—Honestly, I have no clue what you’re thinking, Sam said. 

—I think you’re suffering, the therapist said. 

Of course she was suffering. Everyone was suffering. Sam wondered if church helped.

She didn’t think antidepressants would. It was too bad, really, that she had no faith. 

At home, she threw the prescription out. 

—I don’t need fixing, she said to Zeke. 

~

In the fall, the son of Jack’s old hockey coach OD’d on meth. Just after Christmas, a high schooler accordioned his Civic into the back of a semi in an ice storm, just one interstate exit from home. In the spring, another college student hung himself in the woods behind the gym. 

Three more dead boys. And each time, Sam felt it in her body, that same blast, that outof-nowhere shock. There was no way it could be a coincidence. It was like some kind of weird transmission from the outer reaches of perception, beyond the conscious edge. She felt—there was no other word for it, even though she didn’t believe in gods or spirits—possessed. 

She signed up for yoga classes on her lunch hour. She practiced meditation in the mornings before she left for work. She pinned a Tantric mandala to the wall, dabbed essential oils on her wrists and feet. There was a time when Zeke might have given her a hard time for doing stuff like this, but he said nothing now. 

In yoga class, she sat cross-legged with her palms turned upward on her knees, surrounded by students in college tee-shirts and baggy sweats, cell phones and water bottles and blankets beside them on their mats. On a boom box, a woman’s voice sang Sanskrit mantras. A joss stick gave off a musky reek. 

—The body is not just the physical body, the instructor said. There is an energy that extends beyond our physical wellbeing. 

Sam pushed her thoughts away and turned her closed eyes upward toward her brow point.

A black blob vibrated behind her lids. She focused on her breath. 

— The chakras bring in and emit a flow of energy, the instructor continued. But in times of struggle or change, the energy can become blocked. 

Sam imagined energy blinking on inside her spine like lightbulbs, from root to sacrum, solar plexus, heart, throat, third eye, crown. She breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth. She tried to feel the shiny, pulsing muscle of her heart. 

—The unmanifest energy within is like a coiled snake, the instructor said. When awakened, it rises through the chakras. Aroused, it brings a heightened state of awareness and perception, even enlightenment. But if you are not prepared, it can be a dangerous thing. 

Sam breathed in. Sam breathed out. 

She wondered if the dead boys had woken up the snake. 

~

The explosions in Sam’s chest became more frequent. The signals came from farther and farther away. Sometimes they felt like premonitions; other times, they came too late. She scanned the news: there was a suicide in Crystal Lake, a head-on crash in Centerville, shootings in St. Louis and Spokane. One dead, four dead, twenty-seven dead. Her heart clenched. Afterwards, it hurt to sit up; it hurt to lie down. The ache lingered for days. 

Her GP sent her to see a cardiologist in the city. She took the afternoon off work. Again she sat on an examination table in a paper gown. Again the doctor placed his stethoscope against her back and ribs. His belly pressed against her arm. 

—Breathe in, he said. Breathe out. 

The doctor touched her neck and feet. 

—Any flu-like symptoms? he asked. Vomiting? Fainting? Extreme fatigue? Any new medications? I assume you don’t do drugs? 

She shook her head. No, no, no, no. 

The doctor thought it was probably an inflammation of the heart muscle, somethingcarditis, probably of viral origin. He ordered more bloodwork, another ECG, and prescribed a course of prednisone. 

—Let’s see if that settles things down, he said. 

He didn’t sound too worried, but Sam knew he didn’t have a clue. She felt the snake pushing its way through her chakras, swiveling its scaly head. 

The prednisone made it even more impossible to sleep. Alone in the den at the computer, she surfed the internet. She scanned articles on topics she knew nothing about: cardiac myopathy, extrasensory experiences, pericardial effusion, paranormal perception, empathic telepathy. She read about quantum entanglement, a phenomenon in which two subatomic particles influenced each other over distances as great as light years. She liked the sound of the words quantum and entanglement, quark and antiquark. 

She read, too, about the crisis facing boys and men. Boys across the country were falling behind in school. Boys were twice as likely as girls to be suspended, more than twice as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD, four times as likely to kill themselves. In college, women outnumbered men by three to one. One in nine American men of working age was out of work or not even looking. Millions of men were disconnected, hopeless, unmoored. 

There were all kinds of theories about what was going on. Masculinity had lost its meaning. Feminism had triumphed. The problem was addiction—to video games, to opioids. The problem was the schools. The problem was divorce. The problem was—well, no one knew. 

She thought about Jack in Mexico. Was his life really #incredible? Was he, too, cut off and alone? How could she know? How could she not know? 

She rolled out her yoga mat and set the timer. She tucked her elbows in against her ribs and held her hands before her, fingers pressed together, palms turned up, as if holding an invisible tray, or waiting for a gift. 

Ra ma da sa, she chanted softly. Sa say so hung. 

Sun, Moon, Earth, Infinity: All that is in infinity, I am Thee. 

The yogis said that healing energy flew out into the universe when you said the words. She sent her energy down to Jack in Mexico. The words like quantum particles. The snake a band of light around her heart. 

~

The old dog died in February, two years almost to the day after the first boy’s death. He was Jack’s dog, the one they’d rescued from the shelter when Jack was in the grip of adolescence, nearly six feet tall in sixth grade, needing a friend. Now the dog was fourteen and could no longer walk or eat. At the vet’s, she and Zeke held his old paws in their hands and stroked his head. Zeke wept. Good boy, you’re such a good boy, Zeke said again and again.  

She messaged Jack about the dog. One day went by and then another and he did not respond. It had been more than a week since his last Instagram post, as well. She worried, and the worry made her angry. She wanted to call and give him hell. She texted him a photo of the dog instead. 

The house felt strange and empty without the old dog, like it had when Jack first left for college. The younger dog went off his food and moped. It was gray outside and wet. The dog refused to walk, so Cindy came over and they sat in the kitchen, drinking tea, instead. The dog lay dozing at their feet. 

Cindy reached down to rub the dog’s head.

—Poor puppy. Maybe he could use some Prozac. You should call the vet.

—He’s just sad. 

A siren sounded and Sam’s body tensed. The dog picked up his head and looked around but didn’t howl or even bark. He put his chin back on top of Sam’s foot and shut his eyes again. The siren faded. Sam slowly released her breath. Nothing had happened. Maybe the prednisone had actually helped. 

—Why don’t you go see him? Cindy said. 

—Who, Jack? In Mexico? 

—It’s not like he’s on Mars. 

—Zeke won’t go to Mexico, Sam said. 

It wasn’t true. She was the one who didn’t want to go. Plane fares were a fortune. You couldn’t drink the water. It was dangerous. Everyone got sick. 

—Tell you what, said Cindy, if Zeke’s not up for it, I’ll go to Mexico with you. We can road trip, just us girls. Like Thelma and Louise!   

—With a better ending, I hope! 

—Seriously, it would be so much fun. Think about it! Mariachi bands! Margaritas on the beach! 

Sam laughed. If only she were more like Cindy. More adventuresome, less anxious, less uptight. 

She could hear her father calling, Come on, guys! Let’s go! And she ran to him, ran away from her mother and her be-careful warnings, away from her boring, whiny sisters. That’s my Sammy, her father always said. He put his arm around her and pulled her to him. 

Sam wanted to be like the 97-year-old woman she’d seen the other day on Instagram, winning a 100-meter running race. The old lady wobbled down the track—you could hardly call it running. But the fierceness and determination on her face! As if power could compound with time, like interest. As if confidence could accumulate, like growth rings on a tree. 

Cindy was right. They could go to Mexico in the spring, after Zeke’s season ended, before recruiting heated up. She had vacation time saved up. She would talk to Zeke. 

~

Jack re-posted the photo of the dog a few days later. It took her a while to figure out that the <3 symbol in the caption was a heart. The post was from El Salvador. Hashtags #secretstash and

#offthegrid.  

Where are u? she texted.

Will call soon, don’t worry, he wrote back. 

—I hate this so much, she said to Zeke.  

They were in bed. When they were first married, they’d made fun of couples who didn’t go to bed at the same time. How pitiful! But it had been a long time since she’d come upstairs before Zeke was sound asleep. 

Zeke took her hand in his callused one. It was not enough, but it was something.

—I’m sure he’s fine, Zeke said. 

—Don’t you worry?

—Of course I worry. 

—We didn’t used to worry. 

—You don’t try to control things so much when you’re young. 

—I thought it would get easier when we were older. 

He laughed. 

—Why?

—I don’t know, it was stupid, I just did. 

Zeke closed his eyes. She had been meaning to ask him about the trip to Mexico, but now there was no point. 

After a while, Zeke let go of her hand and turned over. She lay on her back and looked up at the beam. She tried the breathing exercises she’d learned in yoga class. Ra ma da sa, she chanted in her head. But she was not sleepy. She did not feel relaxed. A wave of rose through her body. Sweat prickled her skin. She kicked back the covers and fanned her nightgown. Would it ever end?

Once, when she was nine or ten, she’d gone with her father up to the lake, just the two of them. Morning mist, the smell of rusty screens and mud. Her father fishing off the dock, a mug of coffee at his feet, his pole between his knees. She remembered wandering along the lakeshore, looking for shiny stones. Waves lapped at the sand. Sunbeams flickered on the water. The underbrush buzzed with insects. She hummed the melody that wandered through her head. A pebble glinted at her feet. She reached down and picked it up. It was dark gray veined with white. It was magic, she could tell. 

Around the bend, a pine-needled trail led up the hill, away from the water and the dock. She followed it up the bluff to where a flat rock jutted high over the lake. Teenagers jumped off it, though they weren’t supposed to. There was no one there today. The lake shimmered like hammered metal. Her spine tingled from the height. She touched the pebble in her pocket. If only she could fly, out over the water and away! 

The air was chilly but the surface of the rock was warm. She sat down and then lay back.

The sun pulsed red behind her eyelids, and soon she fell asleep. 

She woke to the sound of yelling. Her father’s voice and other voices too, neighbors rallied to search for the missing child—her! She stood up, her face hot with shame. She wasn’t missing. She was right there. She was fine. 

She climbed down from the rock and her father ran over and clutched her to him. Her face smushed against his belly. His smell of sweat and fish. 

—Don’t you ever run off like that again, do you hear me? he hissed, furious with relief. 

It was hard to believe she was lying here now in that same body, her father so long gone.

That little girl so long gone, too. Nothing ever stayed the same. 

The darkness shifted. Shapes rippled across her field of vision. She blinked hard—she was awake, wasn’t she?—but the shapes kept multiplying, layers of darkness filling the room, crowding in. 

She waved her arms, and the shapes swayed like streamers with the movement her arms made in the air. 

The shapes, she saw, were boys. There was the first boy, frozen, blue as ice. There was the boy in the hoodie who’d been knocked off his bike, blood running down his face. There were the boys who’d overdosed, the accident victims, the suicides. 

—What do you want from me? she asked the shapes. 

The shapes hovered and swayed, ephemeral as breath. 

They wanted nothing from her, she understood. She was the one who’d drawn them in. And then she’d held onto their pain and suffering like an amulet, as if that could be enough to ward off grief. 

—I give up, she said to the shapes. I have no power. Leave me be. 

The shapes were rising now, floating up toward the ceiling, growing dim. And then she blinked, and they were gone. 

~

The phone rang, late. Zeke was out of town at a tournament. She was in bed, alone, asleep. 

The dog stood up and started barking. She fumbled on the nightstand for the phone. Who the hell was calling at this hour? 

—Hello? she said. Hello? 

But no one was there. She squinted at the handset. The screen said Unknown Caller. It must have been a wrong number, a mistake. She turned the handset off and set it back on its base. 

She was just drifting back to sleep when it rang again. Again, her heart jumped. But again, no one was there. What was going on? Was this some kind of prank? 

She turned the light on and pressed redial. The line clicked and beeped. Out the window, in the distance, she watched the red light on the cell phone tower blink. Over the phone came a buzzing sound that might or might not have been ringing, but nobody picked up.   

She switched the ringer off and set the phone down. Then she lay back and waited, counting as she breathed. 

She had nearly reached one hundred when the handset lit up. A muffled ringing rose from downstairs in the den. Then the answering machine picked up. Zeke’s voice announced that he was sorry, they weren’t home right now, please leave a message. No message came, only the dial tone, and the machine clicked off again. 

A wave of dread rose and broke inside her chest. Something must have happened. Something terrible. That was why the landline, why the unknown number, why the middle of the night. 

She didn’t want to know. She refused.  

She got out of bed and reached behind the nightstand and unplugged the phone. But even as she did, the ringing started up downstairs again.  

She went down to the den, barefoot in her nightgown, the dog padding behind her. The neighbor’s garage light cast long shadows across the room. Reaching behind the desk, she unclipped the phone cord from the jack. The handset and answering machine went dark. She pressed the power switch on the computer. It chimed and then went dark as well.  

In the kitchen, the green digits on the microwave read 2:07 am. The refrigerator hummed. She’d left her cell phone charging on the counter. There were three missed calls, five missed texts. She didn’t want to know. She held down the power button and swiped off. 

She went down the back stairs to the basement, the dog at her ankles. The concrete floor was cold. The air was dank. She pulled the string hanging from the light. The fuse box was on the wall behind the dryer. She pulled open its metal door. On the inside of the door was a piece of cardboard inside a yellowed plastic sleeve. The card was a grid with 42 numbered slots. Thirty-four were labeled, a few crossed out. The scrawled handwriting—an electrician’s, or the previous owners—looked like some kind of code: 

MaST. BaTH – ½ BaTH

SIDE PorCH FLooDS

DryER

DoWN HaLL

EXHaUST FaN

FrIG

She reached up and flipped the breakers, right to left, one at a time. The breakers clicked. 

The furnace, the freezer, the refrigerator, sighed and stopped, as if exhaling. The house subsided into silence. 

The overhead bulb winked out. The darkness felt as full as a caress. 

She sat down on the splintery bottom step, pulled her nightgown over her knees, wrapped her arms around her legs. It was cold. The dog settled at her feet. 

She breathed in and out. Her pulse slowed. She waited. 

Her chest did not hurt. She felt fine. 

Margot Singer is the award-winning author of three books: a collection of essays, Secret Agent Man (Barrow Street, 2025); a novel, Underground Fugue (Melville House, 2017), and a collection of short stories, The Pale of Settlement (University of Georgia Press, 2007). She is also the co-editor, with Nicole Walker, of Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013 and 2023). She is a professor of English at Denison University in Granville, OH, where she directs the creative writing program. www.margot-singer.com.