The World Gives Way: A Novel Read online

  “That’s a very serious face,” Myrra said to her, and laughed. Charlotte didn’t giggle back at her, just kept up her determined expression and continued to rock back and forth. Then it dawned on her: Charlotte was trying to stand. She’d never done that before.

  “Come on,” Myrra said. “Pull up.”

  Charlotte squinched her forehead further.

  “Come on. You can do it.”

  Charlotte leaned her body way back and rocked forward, this time using the momentum to pull her body up to stand. Myrra raised her fingers up with her, taking care that she didn’t lose her grip. Charlotte’s knees buckled for a second, but she held on.

  “You did it!” Myrra cried out, her voice much higher pitched than usual.

  Charlotte’s eyes grew wide as saucers, as though she’d just given herself the shock of a lifetime. She held on harder to Myrra’s fingers, a vise grip, and turned her head this way and that.

  “You’re OK,” Myrra said, softening her voice this time.

  At this moment Myrra was relieved to concentrate on something so simple. They’d been in Kittimer four days and no one had tracked them down. She’d been checking the news—trains and ferries were running again in Nabat. But no sign of Tobias. Myrra still woke in a panic at night, vacillated regularly between fear and calm and stress and acceptance. But here in this moment, she was content. It was startling to realize that she could be happy, after everything that had transpired. She wasn’t sure she trusted the feeling.

  Then Charlotte giggled again and bounced her knees, testing her balance and getting bolder. She looked at Myrra with great focus and let out a shout.

  “Aaaaah!” she said. She worked her jaw up and down. “Aaaaauuuuaaaahh!”

  Was she trying to talk as well? Suddenly all Myrra wanted in the world was to hear Charlotte’s first word before everything collapsed.

  Though she worried about getting her hopes up, Myrra couldn’t help anticipating what Charlotte’s first word might be. Ma? Wasn’t ma the standard? Myrra remembered the parenting guides that Imogene had bought when Charlotte was first born—she had all the latest up-to-date parenting advice uploaded onto a separate tablet that she bought brand-new for the occasion. She called it her “Mommy Tablet.” Imogene only got through one or two of the guides before hastily discarding the rest and tossing the tablet into a forgotten drawer.

  “Waste of money… they all say the same thing,” Imogene had said. One piece of advice that Imogene had taken to heart was Talk to Your Baby, as often as possible, and not in baby talk. Babbling baby talk was strictly forbidden.

  “Talking to a baby in full, complete sentences helps the development of synapses,” Imogene had said once while handing Charlotte to Myrra. She was on her way to a charity lunch.

  Myrra remembered her focusing rather intensely on Charlotte after that, speaking directly at her.

  “Charlotte,” she said, in a tone that suggested calling a meeting to order in a boardroom. “Charlotte, I have to go meet with the Gorman Conservation Foundation.” She overpronounced each word.

  “I’ll be back soon. I will miss you. I love you.” Then she kissed the top of Charlotte’s head and departed. In retrospect, Imogene hadn’t been a terrible mother all the time. There just hadn’t been much natural instinct, and never enough hours in the day.

  Myrra had leafed through one of Imogene’s abandoned parenting books later when she was alone. Partially as reading practice, and partially to understand this new, vulnerable being that was in the house.

  “Infants tend to pay more attention and respond more eagerly to baby talk than to normal adult conversation,” it had read. “The playfully exaggerated and high-pitched tone your voice takes lights up your little one’s mind. But use full sentences as well! It is important for your baby to hear how normal conversation sounds. As your child develops and matures, so should the way you talk to her.”

  Myrra suspected that Imogene’s real problem with baby talk had been that she didn’t like sounding ridiculous. Still, in a small gesture to her ghost, Myrra tried to keep the extra-gooey baby talk to a minimum.

  Myrra found herself softening to Imogene’s memory as the days progressed. Maybe that always happened with the dead over time. But also, in a strange way, Myrra was thankful that Imogene had taken the time to tell her what was going on before jumping off the roof. The knowledge that everyone was going to die was a torturous burden, but it also allowed for choice. Without that knowledge, Myrra didn’t think she would have felt the freedom to leave. Imogene hadn’t needed to tell her—Myrra liked to think that her decision to do so was an impulse of kindness.

  Myrra tried to talk to Charlotte as much as possible now that she saw her trying for words. First thing when they woke up each morning, Myrra started chanting, “Mamamamama” to her, over and over again. It echoed the chanting of the monks in the monastery up the hill. She heard them repeating foreign words in singsong tones, keeping time with the clamor of the bells at dawn, noon, and dusk.

  Kittimer had no shortage of bells. Everywhere Myrra walked she heard bells, the sound traversing the roads that zigzagged up steep slopes, through pathways that circled and wound up towers and spires. All tones, high and low, fluttering soft tinkles and large bellowing clangs. Myrra collected their names in her head. Her tongue curled deliciously around the foreign words: ghanta, rin, agogô, tubular, suzu.

  And then under the bells other sounds emerged, the chanting, the prayers, the mantras, drums, hymns, songs, and ululating cries. All blended together into a low hum, the white noise of the faithful. At first Myrra had worried that the noise would bother her or, worse, keep Charlotte awake. But after about twelve hours in Kittimer, it became clear that the sounds of religious services weren’t all that different from the sounds of New London traffic.

  Myrra and Charlotte had much more minimal accommodation now. Instead of a huge marble hotel suite there was a small simple room in a hostel, with plain cement floors and a shared bathroom and kitchenette. Instead of a cliffside view and a balcony, the hostel looked out on a steep side street. There was no window view from their room at all, though the outer wall, the one that faced the street, was composed of a thick pane of frosted pink glass, and it bathed the small room in a rosy light that made everything seem soft. Myrra was still having panic attacks at night, and she especially appreciated the calming effect that the color had on her anxiety-ridden mind. It was easier to calm herself down in this room than it had been in Nabat. Myrra had learned at this point that she felt safer and more at home in a simple, cramped space. It annoyed her that this vestige of contract work had stuck with her, but she accepted that there was nothing she could do to change it.

  There was stained glass everywhere. Thick colored panels replaced the walls in buildings, wedged between I beams and structural supports. Often they were simple slabs of color, as in their room at the hostel, but sometimes the designs would be more ornate, blending many colors into scenes and knots and patterns. Myrra loved wandering into certain temples and cathedrals to stare at the complex geometry of the rose windows, study how the tiny fragments of color all assembled together. None of this inspired in her the same religious devotion that others had, but the beauty still stirred something within. She worried if it was shallow or wrong to like the beauty of a church if she wasn’t also practicing the faith that had inspired its artistry.

  Myrra pulled a jar of mashed peas out of the hostel’s communal fridge for Charlotte’s lunch. When she looked up over the fridge door she saw a very old, pale woman hunched over Charlotte’s stroller. Possessive alarm flared up in Myrra, but she fought to remain calm. The woman straightened up and tilted her face toward Myrra. “Is this your baby?”

  What a question.

  “Yes,” Myrra said, and then, trying not to sound terse, she added, “Her name is Charlotte.”

  “Charlotte,” the woman said, looking down at her. Her gaze was unfocused and her expression vacant. She smiled, and the wrinkles in her cheeks s
tretched and deepened as she did so. “What a lovely name.”

  Since Nabat, Myrra had become increasingly nervous about interacting with others. Even in the hostel’s communal spaces, she tried her best to keep to herself and avoid questions. Every time they went out on an errand, she circled the odd block to check to see if anyone was following her. Myrra briefly worried about giving out Charlotte’s real name to this woman, but it was a relatively common name, and anyway, this woman didn’t seem altogether there.

  The old woman bent forward over the stroller again. “Hello, Charlotte, hello, sweetheart.”

  Charlotte laughed and let out another loud “aaaaaughaaauuugh” sound, wagging her jaw up and down as she shouted out. She was getting so close to talking, Myrra could sense it.

  Myrra sat down at a table next to Charlotte’s stroller and stirred the peas in the jar. Without invitation, the woman sat down across from Myrra and watched as Myrra spooned peas into Charlotte’s open mouth. She made Myrra uneasy, but then everything made her uneasy these days.

  “I have a granddaughter who looks just like her,” the woman said eventually. “At least she used to. I haven’t seen her in some time.”

  Myrra softened. The woman had such a vulnerable look on her face.

  “What’s your granddaughter’s name?”

  “Grace,” she said. Her voice sounded thin and far away. She kept looking at Charlotte, but her smile diminished.

  “I haven’t seen her in a long time,” she said again. “She’s in New London. I left New London because I didn’t want to die in a hospital—I wanted to die here. But then I just kept living. And now I’m afraid if I leave, I’ll get sick again.”

  Myrra didn’t know what to do with this information. A plump dark-skinned woman entered the room and joined them. She looked down at the old woman with kind eyes.

  “Annie,” she said, “I thought you were going to tell me if you wanted to leave your room.”

  “I shouldn’t have to ask permission,” Annie said.

  “Of course not, that’s not what I meant,” the woman said. “I was just worried about you.”

  The old woman, Annie, turned her focus back to Charlotte. The plump woman mouthed “Sorry” over Annie’s head, looking at Myrra. Myrra smiled back at her and scooped another spoonful of pea mush, waving it at Charlotte’s face. Charlotte ate the next bite happily, though drops of green oozed out of her mouth and dribbled down her chin. Myrra wiped her chin with a rag.

  “This is Charlotte,” Annie said to the woman. “Doesn’t she look like Grace?”

  The plump woman looked at Charlotte and nodded, keeping the smile on her face.

  “Maybe a little bit,” she said. “In the eyes.”

  Then she turned to Myrra. She held out her hand to shake. Myrra took it.

  “I’m Rachel,” she said. She gestured to the old woman. “And this is Annie.”

  “Nice to meet you,” she replied, and then thought a minute before she remembered her new pseudonym: “I’m Karen.”

  “So,” Rachel started, pulling a chair up next to Annie, “you on a pilgrimage?”

  “No,” Myrra said, laughing. It was the first question everyone asked here. “I just like the mountains.”

  Annie and Rachel had been in Kittimer, in the hostel, for a year and a half. As the conversation progressed, it was clear that Annie wasn’t always completely cogent, but Rachel confirmed that she had been telling the truth about coming here to die.

  “Pittock’s disease,” Rachel leaned in to tell her while Annie was distracted by Charlotte. Myrra nodded at her as if she knew what that was.

  “But it was the craziest thing,” she said. “Once we got here, her joint pain went away, her lungs cleared, it was as if the whole thing never happened. Unfortunately”—Rachel leaned in even farther—“some of the neurological damage stuck. Poor thing.”

  Myrra kept an eye on Charlotte as Rachel talked, wary of Annie trying to pick her up. A few times she heard Annie call Charlotte “Grace.”

  Rachel seemed excited to have someone to talk to who was below the age of ninety. She gossiped about the Palmer earthquake (“Awful, wasn’t it? I can’t believe it, we barely felt a shudder out here…”), she asked Myrra about Charlotte’s father, eyeing the difference in their skin tones (“Is he still in the picture?”), and she levied cheerful complaints against the hostel’s amenities (“I mean, I know we’re all here to get back to a more pure life, but the bedding is terrible…”).

  That last one especially amused Myrra. Over the course of the past week, Myrra had come to realize that there were two distinct classes of people living in Kittimer: there were wealthy people who lived in lavish houses and apartments, and there were people who were still wealthy, but who lived in sparse dwellings designed to improve one’s soul. Annie and Rachel, it seemed, belonged to the latter category. And as with most people in that category, the minimalism didn’t seem to do much for Rachel’s spirit, though it did cause her to complain.

  There was also a third class of people, Myrra considered: those who lived in more limited dwellings because they actually did have limited means. But nobody in Kittimer bothered discussing that group of people, between all the church visits and chanting.

  “Mamaaa… ma-maaaaa… ma-mamamamaaaaaa…” Myrra sang on one note, softly, her face close to Charlotte’s as they lay in bed. Charlotte’s eyelids kept drooping as she fought sleep. Myrra loved Charlotte’s eyelids, the waxy newness of the skin, the tiny feathery eyelashes poking out.

  There was no bassinet now, and there were no porters to set one up. Charlotte slept against the wall so she wouldn’t fall off the edge of the bed at night, and Myrra slept next to her. At first Myrra had been worried that she would roll over on her while sleeping, but her old childhood instincts were still there. Myrra kept still on her side and welcomed the weight of a warm body next to her, even one as small as Charlotte’s.

  The room was bathed in darkness, just the dim hint of a rosy light from the streetlamps outside. The sun had set hours ago, but Myrra could still hear the melodic chanting up the hill. Charlotte’s eyes were almost closed.

  “Ma-mamamaaaaa…” she sang again. Charlotte’s eyes jumped open, and her nose squinched up in annoyance. Myrra smoothed her hair.

  “Sorry,” she whispered to her. “I’ll leave it.”

  Charlotte’s eyelids drifted closed again. Myrra let herself drift off after a few minutes, after she knew that Charlotte was really asleep. The song of ma-mamamaaaa continued to echo in her skull, even after her voice was silent and her eyes were closed.

  22

  TOBIAS

  For what felt like the millionth time that day, Tobias was looking at Simpson, Simpson was looking disappointed, and Tobias was saying, “I’m sorry.”

  His stitches were bleeding again, and somehow he’d managed to stain Simpson’s sleeve in the process. But that wasn’t what he was apologizing about. Not really. He just found himself apologizing regularly now, about one thing or another. The apologies were all variations on a theme, all referencing his mistake without speaking of it. I’m sorry I let Myrra Dal go. I’m sorry I got injured. I’m sorry I messed up the case. I’m sorry I’m a terrible agent, a terrible partner.

  Everyone said reassuring things to him regarding Dal’s escape, but their tone never matched their words. Every word that came out of Simpson’s mouth sounded like disappointment. And Barnes. Barnes was especially hard to think about.

  They’d called to update Barnes that morning, at Simpson’s insistence.

  “You can’t just avoid him, this is an official investigation,” Simpson had said when Tobias advocated delaying the call. “This isn’t like hiding your report card when you got a bad grade.”

  And in one sentence Simpson reduced him from a competent Security agent to an ashamed freshman. Tobias had felt like saying that he’d never received bad grades in school, but he realized that it was entirely beyond the point.

  They’d called him, and Barnes ma
intained a calm, measured reaction. Lots of “Well, in the future you’ll know…” and “It would have been better if…” eventually devolving to the classic “These things happen…” There was a pause before each of these phrases, as though Barnes didn’t quite know what to say, fishing for meaningful conversation on the fly.

  It would have been better if he’d yelled. If Tobias had been any other agent in the bureau, he would have yelled.

  Then came the death blow.

  “Under the circumstances, maybe it’d be best if you came back in. I could throw this one to Emerson—”

  “No, we can handle it, we’ve got leads—” Tobias practically shouted into the speaker, just as he looked over and saw Simpson nodding in agreement at the words came back in. Simpson stopped mid-nod and glared at Tobias.

  Barnes paused. Tobias could picture him in his office, behind that beautiful oak desk, twirling the edge of his mustache the way he sometimes did when he was mulling something over.

  Simpson cut in, in the quiet. “Sir, I think it might be a good idea for Emerson to have a look. We can head back and give him what we’ve got so far—”

  “What’s your lead?” Barnes asked.

  Tobias jumped in before Simpson had a chance to speak.

  “She headed to Kittimer,” he said. Simpson looked at him as if he had three heads.

  “What makes you say that?”

  Barnes sounded almost playful as he asked the question. Tobias knew he was asking about the lead for the same reason that he hadn’t yelled. He knew that Barnes didn’t entirely take him seriously. He didn’t care. This was his shot, and if that meant grabbing on to the unfair advantage that Barnes had laid out, so be it.

  “We know she took a boat,” Tobias said.

  “That doesn’t mean she took it to Kittimer,” Simpson interrupted. “She could have gone any number of places. She could have followed the coast, headed to Troy. She could have doubled back, just to throw us off. She’s clever enough.”