Chapter I- The Place of Drowning Things

 

Katie never saw the body. She got back to the house long past dark, long past midnight, the moon clear in the sky with that white edge so sharp it looked like it might cut you if you reached out for it too far. There was a silence she could feel even before she rattled her key in the door, jiggling it open to slip inside. 

She went straight to their room, seeing the yellow light make its thin bar under the closed door. Birch was still up, then. Katie hadn’t checked her watch, but it felt late, felt like 3AM all over again. She pushed the door open soundlessly, catching it just at that point before the hinges squeaked. The light was on beside the bed, the portable CD player was wafting out Johnny Cash from its scratchy speakers, and a book flipped open on the bed. It was a mystery novel with a dated cover, a man in shadow with his gun held up behind his ear. Birch wasn’t there.

Katie swung her backpack down on the floor, took off her shoes and got into bed with her clothes still on to wait. The tea on the bedside table wasn’t hot, but still steaming a little in the chill air, giving off a faint scent of echinacea. Katie took a sip and replaced it, turned the book over and read a few words, and waited for Birch. She scrunched down in bed, her eyes heavy. 

Slowly the tea stopped letting off steam, and Katie fell into sleep without dreams, and in the morning Jack came home and told her that Birch was dead. He said it in a whisper, said it like a lie, and the first thing she thought, all she could say was:

“I don’t believe you.” She gazed up at him, bemused, still clumsy and thick with sleep. “What do you mean?” she said, “where is she?”

“Last night we came home around midnight,” Jack said, “she was passed out in your room with the door open. We took her to the hospital, they said she died on the way.” He stopped abruptly as though he knew it sounded absurd, his hands in his pockets, letting his bleach-blonde hair fall into his eyes. “We didn’t know where you were,” he said awkwardly. “We tried to call you…” He trailed off.

Katie looked away, staring off into the corner at the rusted radiator and the overstuffed bookshelf. Birch’s sneakers were there, overturned on the floor. One of the soles had started to peel away, and the toe was all wound around with duct tape. It was fraying at the bottom with a white film along the side, but it still held. Birch’s violin, Lady, was resting in it’s open case. At last Katie found a voice, though her lips moved somehow wrong, suddenly numb.

“She’s barefoot,” Katie said in a whisper, but Jack looked blank. “I want to see her,” she said, and he nodded. They went to the hospital together in his car, a ride that blurred in her memory even as they drove. 

They didn’t let her see Birch. So they drove home again, and Katie shut her eyes against the daylight. 

 

When she was little, when she climbed up trees and raced through the streets and backyards with others, children whose names and faces had long since faded into one another—way back then it seemed there had always been some imaginary companion, some secret-keeper, invisible to the rest, to whom she whispered the stories of her life and thoughts. And when she now tried to see the nameless friend, the face she saw was Birch’s.

The day they met she felt a shock, a thick, weighty jolt through the bottom of her belly as if she’d been in an accident, narrowly escaped death, seen the lights of Heaven or Hell.

They met in Ithaca, in upstate NY, three months after she’d started college there. She was at a party, somewhere up on the hill at a house full of people she didn’t know, full of dim light and beer and the faint smell of weed and bodies all crammed in together too close to dance or talk or hear the music that rattled against the ceiling. Katie was surrounded, she couldn’t get to the door, couldn’t get to the stairs where it was dark and there was space to sit.

There was already someone there, she was small, and all of her an ashy blonde—hair, skin, pale eyes that must have been blue—all of her seemed to be damped down in color, one decibel below the rest of the world. As she sat, looking out at the crowded room, there seemed to be a wash of quiet just around her, suffusing the space just beyond her person.

Someone’s elbow hit Katie in the back, and she jumped away, hearing a disembodied “sorry” float back to her through the crowd.

Katie wasn’t quite sure how it happened, but a little while later, her head aching with the pounding music, she made her way to the stairs, to sit down by the wall, and found herself enveloped in the blond girl’s span of quiet. She wasn’t doing anything, just looking out at the room and playing with an empty plastic cup between her hands, but she turned and met Katie’s eyes as she sat down, and her face had a sudden familiarity.

They talked, the nothing words you said to strangers, and then the party began to thin, the place began to stink too much of beer and weed, and they went out into the clear night and walked, talking about life and art and books they’d read, and all the other things you said to someone you were trying to impress, and then they were down by the river, down in the gorge with the water flowing loud and cold beside them, their breath wafting up in steamy trails into the frigid air. Birch’s face was paler in the moonlight, sharper, and her lips and thin eyelashes flickered, blinking as she spoke. They sat down side by side on the rocks, the cold seeping up from beneath them. 

Birch told Katie she was from further upstate, that she’d run away at fourteen and hitched a ride to Telegraph Avenue all the way on the other side of the country, the other side of the world, then rode back two years later with a junkie boyfriend and his junkie friends. And when she walked back in the door of her house, her mom and dad had hugged her tight, then gone right on as if she’d never been gone.

She told Katie about her violin named Lady, she said she was a photographer, and she liked to shoot in the moonlight, and when she said that she looked down shyly like she thought she might be telling too much. And Katie told her about college, and how she was thinking about dropping out because she felt so far behind in all her classes. Just like she’d felt behind the first day she was there, when everyone else seemed to know their major, to have friends, to have lived away from home and been to Europe and gone to private school, and she was just a tall, awkward kid with frizzy reddish hair from the New Jersey suburbs.

And Birch was listening with a grave intensity, her nose scrunched up and her pale eyelashes fluttering frosted in the moonlight like Katie was telling her a profound truth, like she’d never heard it before but understood it instantly, completely. And they were somehow sitting closer without having moved an inch, and then Birch was kissing her, her small hands moving through Katie’s hair with a thin delicacy, and Katie was pulling her closer, breathing her in with a nervous awe. And when at last they were both shivering, too cold to stay outside any longer, Birch took her hand and led her back to her house, to her room that was all dark wood and blue and silver. They didn’t make love, not then, but Katie fell asleep in a warm haze, half-naked under thick blue covers, wrapped close and tight around Birch’s small body. 

And when in the morning she woke, it was to the sound of music, she opened her eyes and Birch was there, sitting cross-legged at the foot of the bed, playing an eerie gypsy tune on an old fiddle.

That was three years ago.

Katie had always felt too loud, too big and tall and heavy, too quick to trip over her words or her own feet, but beside Birch it seemed to be all right, as though what had always felt like excess was the balance to Birch’s small, silent presence.

And a few weeks later she’d flunked a midterm exam, and gone to Birch’s house to find her pacing the floor of her bedroom with a feral tension. She grasped both Katie’s hands in hers when she walked in. “I can’t be here anymore, I can’t stand it,” she said. 

Katie hugged her close, stroked her hair. “So let’s go away,” she said. Three days later Katie dropped out of college and they went away. They caught a ride with someone Birch knew, some people going west, and they sat squished in the back with everyone’s bags piled up around them. She tried to ask Birch what had happened, why they had to leave so urgently, but she would not say.

“It’s nothing,” she said as they whispered to each other in the  backseat, under the cover of the music. She shied away when Katie tried to put an arm around her, but then Birch took Katie’s hand and gripped  it until it hurt. Birch had a friend when they got to San Francisco, an older woman who let them sleep huddled on her pull-out couch for three weeks until they found a room in a small town in southern Oregon, and part-time jobs together in a used bookstore at next to minimum wage. 

After a month or so they settled into something. In the morning they both worked, and in the afternoon they came home, and Birch read books, or immersed herself in tiny, obscure projects with spiral notebooks and charcoal drawings, or else she picked up Lady, the violin, and played her until long past nightfall. Katie had always let her painting be an afterthought, taking up pencils and brushes when inspiration struck, when she had the time, when school work was light. But now, with nothing to do but shelve books in the mornings, everywhere she looked she saw scenes, figures, corners and details sketched, scribbled, struck out in oils. She drew every day, spent all her extra money on art supplies. Her clothes became spattered with splotches of paint, she threw away pages and pages, and slowly, as she could afford the materials for it, she stacked up finished canvases in the corner of the room, refusing to let them be hung in their room, or elsewhere in the house.

And slowly, it had become a life. They fought infrequently, sharp words from Katie, and wordless staring from Birch that made Katie feel as though she might be going mad. They made up afterward with sex and reassurance, forgot the argument again within days. Katie’s parents began to call again after a long silence, and they offered to pay for college courses, if she would take them. She started to, one or two at a time at a community college, and one semester she signed up for an advanced calculus class, so that Birch could take it in her name.

For a few months, their room was filled with paper scribbled all over in blue ballpoint pen with signs and symbols and a few scattered numbers that looked to Katie more like witchcraft than like math. And Birch came back home from school in a determined quiet, with a flush in her cheeks. But when Katie tried to persuade her to take more classes under her own name, Birch just shook her head, not brushing back her pale blond hair when it fell into her eyes.

The math class ended, “Katie” got an A, the real Katie signed up for art history and intro economics, and the pages of signs and symbols got stacked at the bottom of the bookshelf, under books by Virginia Woolf and Jonathan Lethem, and The Ultimate Guide To Lesbian Sex.

Three years went by, it was a life, and now Birch was gone, and Katie couldn’t even begin to think, couldn’t begin to understand that she would never touch her face again, never sleep with that small body in her arms, wake up in the night to see that pale blond hair glistening in the moonlight against her own skin.

Katie and Jack went back to the hospital in the afternoon, and still they told her nothing. “You’re not family,” said the young, kind nurse, and when she heard the words Katie wanted to throw back her head in a wordless, senseless howl of grief. Not family, no, she wasn’t family, she was everything. Birch was everything. But Jack was there with her and he grabbed her shoulders as if to stop her. He had been there when they took her in, and when he asked the question they answered. “It was a heroin overdose,” he said, and the nurse nodded without saying it aloud.

Katie stood for a moment in stunned silence, then spoke in fragments: Birch wouldn’t, she didn’t—not that.

They shook their heads, suppressing smiles of pity, or scorn, or kindness. And what could she say? Birch never touched drugs, never spoke of them one way or another—when anyone around her did, she just wrinkled up her nose and gave Katie a smile, her “people do such silly things,” smile. If she’d ever used, even if she’d been straight-edge and vehement, Katie might have found a way to believe it. 

“She didn’t,” Katie said again, and then, “Please let me see her.” But they had not.

 

Birch’s family came a few days later, cold pale people who looked a little like her, but with a strange flatness about them, or maybe that was just Katie’s mind wringing them out, not wanting to see a resemblance to Birch in these people who did not like her. There was a mother, a boy and two girls, all a little younger than Birch. There was a father, too, a dark-haired man, but he stayed in the driver’s seat as though it were a getaway car, staring hunched through the window.

They greeted Katie with a friendly indifference, and spoke among themselves in hushed tones. They took away all of her things, going through the bookshelves and holding up volumes for Katie to claim or let go. She watched as they gathered up Birch’s clothing, her photos, the ratty stuffed basset hound she’d had since childhood.

And then the mother, the woman with hair just the same as Birch’s was, with a drawn face and heavy circles beneath her eyes, she was reaching for Lady.

“That’s mine,” Katie said, without thinking, too harsh. Birch’s mother went still, and looked at Katie with ice.

“This is Amanda’s violin,” she said, “we bought it for her eleven years ago.”

“She gave it to me,” Katie said, her face hot. “Please. I’ll pay you for it.”

The ice-mother might be about to laugh, or about to slap her. She held up the case, dangling it from a thin hand. “This is a ten-thousand dollar violin,” she said.

“I’ll pay in installments,” Katie said instantly, even though she couldn’t, not in a year, not in ten years, not in never. The boy, who was maybe fifteen, and dark-haired, not like his sisters, he hadn’t spoken, hadn’t helped carry Birch’s things, just stood in the corner with his hands in his pockets. Now he raised his head.

“Mom, just let her have it.” She gave him a snappish look.

“You expect me to believe Amanda just gave a ten-thousand dollar violin to some roommate?”

“Mom,” he said again. He was standing next to the stack of canvases, and when she turned to him she must have seen it, the front painting was of Birch, naked on their bed.

Katie had just finished it, two, maybe three days before she died. Birch insisted she would pose nude, but only if Katie took off her clothing, too. 

“Otherwise I’ll be self-conscious,” she said, and grinned. 

Katie painted with better detail than she’d ever found before, she’d touched with her hands already every curve, every nuance, tasted her skin so many times. Halfway through the last session she’d thrown aside her brush to dry with paint still on it, distracted beyond thought, the need inside her a ravenous thing. Birch shrieked with laughter as Katie leapt onto the bed and kissed her, bit her, and they made love like it was new, like it was an ancient thing, and afterward, her skin still hot to the touch, Katie got up and finished the painting with the taste of sex and Birch still on her lips.

And now Birch’s mother was staring right at it.

Katie darted forward, noticing suddenly how small and thin they all were, feeling large and heavy and clumsy as she moved across the room and turned the painting to face the wall.

“Paul,” said the ice-mother calmly, “please get Amanda’s things.” The three children together gathered up the boxes and hurried them out the door. Paul paused as he passed Katie.

“She’s just sad,” he whispered, and his whole face quivered for a moment before he turned away and almost ran out the door into the hallway. The ice-mother set the violin case on the floor and straightened, then took a step back.

“Keep it,” she said, and she walked out of the room.

Katie locked the door behind them and picked up Lady’s case. She sat down cross-legged on the bed and hugged it to her chest until the hard seams bit into her skin, starting bruises.

More days went by, and Katie only left the half-empty room to go to work, where the quiet of the bookstore was another shelter, only jarring her back to life once in a while to help a customer.  Jack or Evan came in once or twice a day as if to make sure she was still there. Jack came in one night carrying two mugs of hot chocolate. She looked at the door and saw Evan there, hovering half out of sight.

“You can come in,” Katie said, her voice a little hoarse. She had been given the weekend off, and she realized as she said the words that it was the first she had spoken since coming home two days ago.

Evan came in and perched on the foot of the bed next to Jack. they looked so much alike that their relationship had always struck her as some strange expression of egotism, but they seemed happy. Jack led, Evan followed, and Katie had never seen them fight.

“How are you doing?” Jack said at last. Katie took a sip of the drink too fast, scalding her mouth.

“Thanks for the chocolate,” she said.

“We want to help,” Evan said quietly, and she pulled her knees up closer to her chest, forming a wall.

“She didn’t overdose,” Katie said suddenly, before she was aware the words were forming.

Jack and Evan exchanged a look. “Yeah, she did, sweetie,” Jack said in a tone meant for a child, as though he thought she might be going mad.

“She didn’t!” His tone had sparked some fury deep inside her, and now she was talking too fast to stop. “She didn’t, she didn’t! I lived with her for three years. She wouldn’t have taken that shit, not for any reason.” They were looking at each other again, trading nervous glances.

“Katie,” said Evan, “Have you thought that she might have—I mean, she was very withdrawn. She didn’t seem to be… happy.”

Not happy. Quiet, shy, withdrawn in public, but Birch was alight with happiness, with some ephemeral glow of vitality; her presence was so strong, so bright it swept Katie up until she couldn’t tell her own happiness from Birch’s. “She didn’t kill herself,” Katie said flatly, the rush of adrenaline gone as fast as it had come. They sat there a while in silence, and then Jack and Evan left, and spoke in hushed tones outside her door. 

Weeks passed. Somehow, improbably, life returned to a vague normalcy. She went to work, came home in the afternoon, sketched and painted things she saw in the street. When she thought of it, it seemed incomprehensible that there could be a world without Birch, that life could continue at all, that she could draw breath, and Birch be gone. But the times when she did not think of it grew more frequent, and slowly she became accustomed to a day when she did not come home to Birch’s presence, where she went to bed and rose alone.

Early in March Jack’s cousin came to visit. Katie heard her arrive from within her room, heard the table sounds of dinner and talk and drinks poured out after, glasses of wine from the tiny stash Evan kept in a cardboard box under their bed. A little while after midnight there was a knock on Katie’s door. She answered in pajamas, her hair bushy and flat on one side where she’d been lying down reading a book. Jack was there, the girl beside him. 

“This is my cousin Courtney,” he said. She was tall, taller than he was by a couple of inches, and she looked like Jack, but with long brown hair that probably matched his natural color. 

“Hi,” Katie said briefly.

“Come have dessert with us,” Jack said all in a hurry. Katie ran her fingers through her hair to smooth it down and shrugged. She followed them down into the kitchen. Evan had made brownies, thick with bitter chocolate and Godiva liqueur. They were still hot from the oven, and Courtney bit into one too quickly and burned her mouth. She dropped the brownie and gulped down milk, then looked up at the table with milk on her upper lip, and chocolate smeared across her chin. Katie laughed spontaneously, and the foggy weight of sleepiness receded a little.

“Katie’s an artist,” Jack said, and turned with unnatural brightness to Katie. “Courtney’s fiancé is a sculptor.”

“Oh,” said Katie awkwardly as Courtney wiped her face clean with a paper towel. “What kind of sculpture?” she asked, realizing as she spoke that she was genuinely curious. Courtney shrugged.

“Different kinds. Last year he did a series with found objects, now he’s working in metal, he’s welding street signs and fenders together.” With large gestures she described the structure, and Katie tried to follow her hands and words, envisioning the half-finished work suspended in mid-air, a twisted cityscape forged into being with scraps of steel and iron nails and a blowtorch. The vision was dystopic, magnificent, and Katie put a hand on her stomach, slightly seasick.

“Katie, show her your paintings,” Evan commanded, and Courtney nodded eagerly. 

“I’d love to see them,” she said, and she sounded like she meant it. Katie rose nervously, biting down on the things she was accustomed to saying, I’m not any good, it’s not my best, it’s ugly, it’s silly, I hate it.

They came into her room behind her, crowding all three in the doorway as she shifted a pile of clothing from the floor to the armchair, clearing a path to the finished canvases stacked against the wall. She let Courtney flip through them. The one of Birch was at the back, facing the wall where it had been since her mother left. 

“Hey,” Courtney said, craning her neck to see the picture. “Can I turn this around? I think I know her.”

“You don’t,” Katie said, her chest suddenly hot and empty. “I mean, yeah, go ahead.” 

Courtney lifted it easily and turned it around, and Katie was struck with a sickly sense of exposure as Birch’s naked flesh was laid bare in light that was at once too bright, too harsh. But Courtney’s eyes were on the painted girl’s face, and she was nodding.

“I know this girl,” she said, “I met her a couple of weeks ago, I was in New York visiting my grandparents. I ran into her a couple of times, I don’t remember her name.”

“That’s Birch,” Evan said with warning in his voice, and Courtney quickly replaced the painting at the front of the stack.

“Sorry,” she said. “It wasn’t her, obviously. Just somebody with similar features. Anyway, her name was something regular, like Ashley.”

“Amanda?” Katie said softly, and Courtney seized on it with relief.

“That was it. Amanda. Is she a sister or a cousin or something? They look a lot alike.” Katie nodded.

“Something like that,” she said softly. 

“Small world,” Courtney said naturally, as if it were a conversation. As one the three turned to leave the room. 

“More brownies to finish!” Evan declared, and they tramped out after him. Katie followed them to the door and shut it quietly as soon as the last was through it. New York. That was it. Amanda. Katie closed her eyes and breathed deeply. She longed to chase after Courtney, to go and wake her in the middle of the night and ask her, where, and why and how, where did you meet her? What did she say? How did she look? Was she all right, was my Birch all right, was she my Birch at all? But she did not.

 

It was that night that Katie began to dream of dead girls. 

She was on the side of the highway in the dark– it didn’t feel like night, there was enough light to see by but she couldn’t find its source, as if the air itself was dimly illuminated. There was no moon, no sign of artificial light, and the air was damp and cool. Katie had gone to bed in only an undershirt and shorts, and it was all she was wearing now. She shivered, pulling her body in close on itself. She looked around her.

The road was empty far in both directions; she couldn’t see or hear a car, and the blacktop seemed somehow thin, as if it might not take her weight. She backed away from it, climbing over the guardrail to the embankment. It was grassy and wet, slick under her bare feet, the mud moving with her weight, shifting her balance under her. The woods lay below her, the trees stretching up above her to the sky. She couldn’t see through them to another side, and the forest was flooded, water reaching up the trunks– half the trees were dead, drowned, stripped bare but still standing, strewn among their living fellows. There was no wind– everything was still around her.

And then the first girl swam up from the water. 

She was very young– she couldn’t have been eighteen–and she surfaced a few feet from where the water ended and the mud began, and walked toward Katie on unsteady legs. She opened and closed her mouth a few times as if not finding her voice, her purple lips making soundless shapes. Her skin was grey, her hair was stringy with lakewater and tangled up in algae, and she was naked, her flesh marked here and there with shallow cuts and scrapes that gaped but did not bleed. Katie felt herself draw back inside, but she did not move as the dead girl stopped only inches away. Her mouth opened and closed again, and Katie heard her voice come out, less than a rasp, less than a whisper.

“What are you doing here?” 

Katie shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“You’re alive.” The word was a hiss, and Katie heard it whistle through the holes in her rotting lungs. But her breath smelled like the forest, like the dirt and moss and  cool, shadowy air. Katie shivered again, the cold had gotten worse and she wondered if it were emanating from the dead girl, radiating out with the chill of the grave. 

“I’m looking for someone,” Katie heard herself say, and the dead girl’s eyes flashed suddenly. They were bright blue, and fresh as if she were still alive, but they stared at her without comprehension.

“You’re alive,” she mouthed again, and shook her head, her hair slapping wetly at her shoulders. 

“I’m looking for Birch,” Katie said loudly, and her voice echoed through the trees. The dead girl leaned in close to whisper. Her lips brushed Katie’s ear and her body shuddered,  anxious to get away. Katie forced herself still, forced herself to stay. 

“I don’t know that name,” the dead girl said.

“I need to find her,” Katie said, “she’s small, blond. She died.”

“You love her!” The dead girl ripped herself away, dancing backward in an instant, her voice was accusatory and loud for a moment before it faded again into a scant sound. 

“Yes.”

The girl backed away, her hands rising up to her hair and tangling until her fingers disappeared.

“This the place of drowning things,” her throat forced out the words, “there is no love here. There was a boy, he loved me once, but there is nothing like that here.”

“Do you mean this is only people who drowned?”

“Drowned and drowned, down and down. Go away.” The girl was sulking, folding her thin arms across her chest.

“Please, tell me something!” Katie heard her voice crack on the edge of desperation. “You’re the first– the only person I’ve met who might help.”

“No one helps,” the dead girl said. “Ask them, but they won’t help you.” She gestured at the water and Katie saw the figures beginning to rise up from the water– they formed beneath the surface before they broke it, dark shapes under the waves that slowly turned to human beings, walking slowly toward the shore, coming out from among the trees. The first to make it to the shore were women, young and old but they looked alive, not like this waif who wavered at the edge of decomposition. They came toward her in fluid motions, and Katie found herself rooted to the sand beneath her feet as they approached. Hands and arms stretched out for her, trailing algae, grabbing at her hands, stroking her hair, surrounding her. She did not know, at first, what was strange about them (though she knew that they were dead, dead of course they were dead, this was the place of drowning things). They were cold to touch, coming up into her arms as if from a cold, cold pond and touching her with turgid fingers.

They were dead, of course, but there was no way to speak the word– this one slipped her fingers between Katie’s lips, holding down her tongue, while that one held her about the waist so she could not move. Fingers wrapped around her ankles, tracing up and down the tendons of her feet and taking hold of her toes, hands slid down beneath the fabric of her clothes, lifting up her breasts, taking hold of her shoulders, her arms, her hips. And faces, everywhere, white and black and shades of brown, all fading to shades of grey, with those eyes too bright for life, too fresh for death, staring into her as a thousand whispers assaulted her ears, “alive alive she’s alive, it’s alive, it’s alive let me touch it alive….”

“BIRCH!” Katie screamed the name out and it shook the air around them, shook the sand beneath them but still the dead girls held her tight until she screamed it again and again, screamed the name like it could save her, but all the dead girls in the world were there to steal her warmth, and the echo faded deep into the trees. Katie looked up at the sky as they slid their hands over her, gazing up into the sea of dead stars until at last– she awoke.

After that, the dead girls were in her dreams nearly every night. Not all at once, not in the drowning place, but flitting through the natural world, playing the roles of people she knew, walking past her, touching her cheek with a passing shiver. She closed her eyes and saw their faces, newly dead and long decayed, skeletal and shrunken with those fresh new eyes. She slept less and less, awakened in the middle of the night and unable to fall back asleep, the bed spreading widely out underneath her, too big, big enough to consume her without Birch there to help her fill it.

In the daylight she went to work, came home, read books and watched television, and everywhere she sensed the dead girls watching, waiting, hovering nearby. Until at last, she began to see them in the daytime.

The first one came into the bookstore, and bought a novel by Candace Bushnell. She was the same girl from the drowning place, from the trees by the highway, the one who had spoken to her, and now she was dressed in jeans and a white tank top, her bruised and withered arms with their open, bloodless wounds exposed under the florescent lights, holding up the book she wanted to buy. She set it on the counter and said nothing.

(Not real, it’s not real), Katie thought in a panic (you’re hallucinating, she’s not real, she’s not dead, it’s someone else or else it’s in your head.)

“Would you like anything else?” she brought herself to say, and the dead girl shook her head mutely, her stringy hair dropping bits of dark plant matter onto the floor. Her feet were bare and grey. Katie took the book from her and rung it up, told her the price and took the money from her hand. It was all single bills, crumpled and wet and stinking of the swamp. Katie smoothed them out and put them in the register, and when she looked up the dead girl and the book were gone, leaving a puddle on the floor where she had stood. Katie went to the back room and found the mop, and cleaned up the spot.

For the next few days, she glimpsed them on the street, saw them staring out of car windows at her as she walked, sitting in the corners of cafes, drinking nothing and watching her as she read. At night she was followed by the sound of bare feet on concrete, though there was never anyone behind her, and sometimes outside her bedroom window, figures raced by and slapped at the window with anxious, heavy fingers. When that happened, she pulled the covers over her head and closed her eyes. They never came into the house, never appeared in her bedroom, and though she strained to look each time one appeared who was small, who was blonde, she never saw Birch among them. Then one morning as she was leaving the house with Jack, the first dead girl was waiting on the sidewalk.

She was wearing an oversized sweatshirt, the hood pulled low over her face so that the sun would not show her blue, sunken face, the sleeves long enough to conceal her bony hands. Her feet were covered in socks, but she wore no shoes. 

“Who’s that?” Jack said, and Katie shook her head. No one. They turned the other way, and the dead girl grabbed her arm.

“I have to talk to you,” she said. 

Katie tried to pull her arm away, but the dead girl’s fingers were locked in tight on her flesh. “What?” she said sharply.

“Do you know her?” Jack said aloud, and Katie nodded impatiently.

“It’s fine,” she said, and let the dead girl pull her in closer and whisper harsh and quiet into her ear, her tongue flickering out of her mouth, brushing Katie’s skin and making her hair stand on end. 

“I’ve been looking for your girl,” she said. “She isn’t among us.”

Katie looked behind her quickly. Jack was there waiting, listening, ready to jump in and pull her free, pull her safe. She bent her face to the dead girl’s, whispering back as the wet, tangled hair fell upon her cheek and stayed there flat. 

“She didn’t drown,” she whispered, and the dead girl shook her head again.

“Drowned in anger, drowned in loss, drowned in drowning, not in water, but she isn’t among us. She isn’t in the place of drowning things.”

Katie’s heart was beating fast, and she realized she was gripping the dead girl as tightly as she was being held, they were locked together in a struggle or in an embrace. 

“So where is she?” she asked.

“Not among the dead.”

Katie met her eyes. “Then–” The dead girl shook her head.

“Ask the pigeons, ask the river, ask the man in the moon. I don’t know. But she is not among the dead, she is not among the drowned.”

Katie shook her head, more, she needed more but the girl had given everything, she didn’t know any more. “Is there anything I can–” She cut off as the dead girl shook her head.

“Nothing, not for me, not now. Someday.” The dead girl let go her arm and leaned in closer. In a second her fingers had slid into Katie’s open mouth, pressing down her tongue. Katie jerked back in panic, and the girl pulled away instantly. 

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, “you’re so warm.” She put her fingers between her own lips, sucking on them, then turned and ran, her socked feet slapping on the concrete until she had disappeared around a corner.

“What the fuck was that?” Jack said, and Katie shrugged.

“Just a girl I used to know.”

“Is she strung out or something?”

“I think so,” Katie said. “Jack, I think I have to leave.”

He nodded. “I want to help you, Katie.”

She shook her head, tears forming behind her eyes again, even though she thought she had run out weeks ago. “I know, but I think I have to get out of town.” He hugged her, and she held on as if his body could shield her from something. 

“Are you going home?” he asked, and she seized on it.

“Yeah. Go stay with my mom and dad for a while,” she said, and she felt him nodding above her, she couldn’t understand how he could not be aware that she was lying. 

She didn’t sleep that night, but packed a backpack with sketchpads and pencils and a change of clothes. Everything else could be left behind. The next morning she gave Jack a check for the next month’s rent, all the money she had left, and told him she was visiting her parents for a while, back East. She left late in the morning and set about hitching a ride to New York.