A traffic jam met them at the Kansas border. As they crept closer, Shane saw there was a brand-new checkpoint, manned by men with assault rifles, wearing an eclectic mix of military camouflage and SWAT-team black. They were checking the IDs of every passenger in every vehicle.
“This wasn’t here when we left,” said Lali.
“I know, hon.”
“What is it?”
“It’s nothing. They’re just going to check our IDs.”
The line crept forward as they waved drivers through. But when there were only two cars ahead of them, the man began gesturing for the driver of the Chevy Suburban to get out. There was an argument. Lali was now watching intently.
“What is happening?” she demanded. Shane said nothing. “Mama, what are they doing?” Then the man with the gun pulled on the handle of the door. When it didn’t open, he reached through the window and unlocked it from the inside. He grabbed the driver by the arm and jerked her out, a middle-aged white woman wearing a faded dress with a chintzy flower print. She was protesting and trying to pull her arm back as the cop—or whatever he was—guided her to a trailer off the side of the highway. Lali was practically shouting. “What are they doing. Why are they taking her out? Are they going to take us out?”
“No, doll.” Another armed man got in the woman’s car and began driving it to the berm.
“Mommy,” Lali was crying, panicked. Shane’s heart beat so hard it hurt her chest, and she felt like throwing up. “Let’s turn around,” Lali sobbed. “Please, let’s turn around.”
They were one car back. A new border guard leaned into the window of the gray sedan in front of them. Shane had an ID with a white surname and wondered if she should reach for that now. Simone Schafer came in handy sometimes.
“Mommy, I don’t want to go. They’re going to take you. I know they’re going to take you.” Lali kept repeating this, and it was too eerie and specific a fear, as if she subconsciously knew what her mom had been doing all these years.
“Doll, you gotta stop crying, okay? It’s all going to be—”
She looked over and saw the stain in the crotch of Lali’s ill-fitting slacks. The first time in nearly a year. Now Lali’s crying was streaked with this new shame, and her sobs were just too loud. They were almost up.
Shane reached into the truck’s back seat for Lali’s backpack and shoved it onto her lap to cover her accident. Then she grabbed her daughter’s face.
“Baby, it’s fine. All right? I’m not going to let anything happen to me. And I’m not going to let anything happen to you. It’s you and me, right? They can’t touch us, right?” Lali had a single terrified syllable stewing in the back of her throat. She could smell the salt of her girl’s tears.
“Please,” Lali moaned. “Let’s just turn around. Turn around turn around turn around—”
“Lals.” She cut her off. “Lals. Who are we? We’re outlaws, right?”
Lali nodded miserably, choked, and nodded some more.
“I ain’t going anywhere and neither are you. Except home. You and me forever. Got it?”
Lali sobbed and nodded, and the car in front of them drove on. The man with the assault rifle waved them forward. She pulled on her dust mask and waited for two tumbleweeds to bounce past before pressing the accelerator. He was young, white, and the absence of emotion on his face made her skin crawl. He took her ID. Shane Acosta of Lawrence, Kansas. He looked at it for a long time. Then he looked through the window at Shane. Then Lali. She could not help but think of how easy it was for men like this, in this same position at border checkpoints all over the world, to do whatever they wanted to a mother and daughter on their own.
“Lower your mask,” he said, and she did. He looked from her face to the ID and back.
“This all is new,” said Shane, giving her voice a friendly twang.
“This your daughter?” he said.
Lali let a sob escape and Shane willed her to be calm.
“Yes, sir. She had an accident while we were waiting, which is why she’s feeling silly.” Shane lifted the backpack to show him. Lali stared at the carpet while tears dripped from her eyes. The man said nothing. He handed back her ID and waved her on. Lali sobbed quietly as they put distance between themselves and the new haunted borderland.
Off the highway, they drove through the vanished municipalities of southern Kansas, abandoned downtowns and foreclosed suburbs looking even more ethereal in the dim, dead light. Most people had moved on years ago. The Ogallala in retreat, the great western drought dessicating the land, there simply wasn’t enough water. The ones who stubbornly remained, who’d dug wells halfway to the core of the Earth or rigged complex rainwater capture systems, were isolated and paranoid. One trailer, built on the remnants of an abandoned feedlot, had an enormous sign with neon-green spray paint beaming brightly through the gloom: FUCK OFF! NOTHING LEFT 2 STEAL!
A drive that should’ve taken fourteen hours ended up at seventeen, and Shane, exhausted and twitchy, pulled in front of their small rental on a side street of a struggling college town. She wanted nothing more than to collapse into bed, praying for a sleep without dreams. She woke Lali. Backpack slung over a shoulder, Lali’s hand in hers, she pounded up the porch steps, the thud of their feet warped in the grim gray cloud enveloping the town. She worried what this air was doing to her daughter’s lungs.
As she slid the key into the lock, she noticed it. To the left of the door, above the mailbox stuffed with junk, their house number: 315. Something was wrong, and it took her a moment to make sense of it. The 5 was turned upside down and bolted back in so it read like an S.
31
At first, she only struggled to imagine how this could be, who would have done this, and she almost turned the key and opened the door anyway—she was just so very tired. But this oddity, it mattered, she was sure, and her mind went racing backward to find a context. Back through the Gulf Coast and Lawrence and a cabin in Wisconsin and a chain restaurant in Ohio and a fallow field in South Carolina on a too-warm winter night.
She withdrew her key.
“Why aren’t we going in?” Lali asked. She was still half-asleep. Shane looked all around the door. The windows all had the blinds pulled down as she’d left them.
“Lals, go back and get in the car.”
“But why?”
“Just do it, okay? And don’t get out no matter what.”
“Is something wrong?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Maybe.”
With Lali back in the truck, Shane pushed through the brush on the left side of their lot, eyeing the neighbors’ house, though no one appeared to be home. In the small backyard, where she and Lali had once tried to grow tomatoes only to be defeated by raccoons, she approached the back door. She put her ear to it and listened, as if this would tell her anything. She dragged a filthy plastic lawn chair to the opaque bathroom window. Taking one more look around to make sure she was alone, she smashed the glass in with her elbow. She removed the remaining shards from the frame and poked her head in. The bathroom door was open, and through it, she could see the edge of the living room. It looked as if the furniture had been rearranged.
The problem was they couldn’t just leave. There was a folder, hidden in a hollowed-out shelf of the bookcase next to her piano, with information that could lead back to her original self. And maybe she didn’t matter so much. If it wasn’t for Lali, maybe she would just leave it all there and take her chances. She crawled through the window, careful to avoid scraping herself, and crunched over the broken glass on the floor. She eased her head out to peer down the hall.