sensed that something had shifted, something that would prevent them from returning, would make returning impossible. They moved. The new apartment was smaller but roughly the same, with thin walls and plastic mini-blinds that always snapped loose from their cord.
Nothing was remarkable. Most things were the same. The years passed.
And then, one day, her mother put on a pair of thin white gloves cut to the elbows, took to her bed and did not leave her room for days, then weeks, lights off and the curtains pulled. Months passed. It was spring. There was no way to explain it: she’d stopped. Stopped cooking, stopped leaving, stopped working. She drew a check from the state and hunkered down. Called it witnessing. Called it preparing. She sat in the armchair and smoked, letting the ash build. She wouldn’t take off the gloves, refused to touch things with bare hands. Wouldn’t take the medication the doctors gave her, little sample boxes stuffed in her purse. Her hands shook. They were bad doctors, she said, they were men in coats who would kill her. The locks on the house got changed. Evade, evasive, evasion. Vivian didn’t know what to do. The house got cold. It was winter. It was another spring.
One morning, riding the bus to junior high, a car accident had traffic tied up and detoured. Along the new route, Vivian saw the house and realized with dread it was where they’d camped. There in a brackish pocket of forest. It was dilapidated, slanted low, with an anemic front porch that swung away from the wood siding and smashed windows. She couldn’t believe it.
And that house is where she went when, a few months later, she returned home from school to find her mother stockpiling nonperishables in the living room, building a whole color-coded wall of cans that already stacked halfway to the ceiling. It must have taken the entire day, which meant her mother had skipped work for the second time that week. She had a job at a factory clothing outlet back then, tagging polo shirts and pinning imperfect turtlenecks to mannequins. Vivian said why didn’t you go to work, and her mother said what she’d said the last time. Who cares about shirts, it’s too late. She stacked more cans. Vivian left, overwhelmed and claustrophobic. She wasn’t thinking where she was going until it occurred to her that she was walking toward the junior high and that she would pass the abandoned house if she kept walking east, and she kept walking east.
That was the year things changed. Vivian learned how to cook. How to clean, how to leave. She kept the word evasion in the back of her throat, made it the name for a new disease.
The movie theatre was a fifteen-minute walk from the house and easy to find—seven blocks east, then maybe four blocks north—across from a 24-hour pharmacy that rarely stayed open past ten. The theatre was a boxy two-story that held firmly to its crumbling street corner. The ticket booth glowed.
Vivian considered her options. The showing she was about twenty minutes late for was a Hindi film. The poster for it, hanging next to Tickets and spotlighted by a flickering bulb, showed a woman wrapped in a red sari, from the elbows up, one of her eyes reflecting a fence of bars all linked up to form a tiny cage, like a thimble basket. Vivian bought a ticket and passed through the lobby—threadbare rose carpet, faded fleur de lis wallpaper and dim chandeliers—up a short spiral staircase to auditorium two, which was empty though the movie played anyway, sifting a boisterous soundtrack through the aisles and over all the vacant seats.
In the film there was a ceremony. One of the daughters of the first family, Chitra, was going to marry the son of the man who walked with a cane. Chitra, the woman from the poster. On the terrace when the rain started: a deluge that conjured a sudden river. A locket shoved hastily inside a drawer. Sheet of black hair braided patiently into an elaborate crown. Lotus blossoms spun downstream. The clouds gathered. A woman lit candles then placed them one by one in barrel-shaped lanterns. A can of condensed milk, folded into the bowl of flour. The clock struck four. She was kneeling. She was on her hands and knees sifting through the dirt, trying to unbury something. Or bury something.
Halfway through the film the theatre door opened. Vivian assumed it was an usher staking out his ten-minute break. Instead it was another moviegoer, a guy who walked down to the front and slid into a seat, which felt to Vivian mildly disturbing, an interruption that displaced her privacy even in the dark room. On the screen, another suitor had arrived. When he opened a suitcase a cloud of finches shimmied out, then took off, soaring over the crowd of guests. And now the new family, the man with the cane, his wife in perfectly draped silk, her bangles slipping as she reached to tap his shoulder—Vivian found that she could watch the action and simultaneously keep the guy up front in her peripheral view. He restlessly leaned forward, leaned back.
A finch in someone’s pocket; a boy with a comb in his mouth. A third sister, possibly a cousin, threaded a needle and strung a palmful of teeth on a ribbon one by one. The final scene was in grayscale, someone tossing a fistful of birdseed at someone else’s feet.
She watched the credits trail over the screen, cursive that scrolled to fog letters, and pretended to be deep in concentration about something when she saw the guy standing, walking up the aisle, headed her way. Turning to reach for her coat just as he got to her row and moved past, she listened to the door swinging closed behind him, a dull thud. Her face burned with the recognition that she knew the guy, after all, because he was her neighbor.
Vivian stood squinting in the dusty lobby, her eyes slow to adjust to the new brightness. The running guy and Vivian were the only two people around, besides the teenager who left the box office with a push broom and a woman at concessions. When Vivian came out of the theatre, Ronny had been talking on the payphone stationed across the lobby, between the restrooms. Vivian bent to tie her shoes which turned out to be boots and did not have laces. She adjusted the knees of her tights instead, pulling straight the ribbing. She was buying time. When he hung up, Vivian hesitated, then surprised herself by waving. He shrugged and headed across the room to where she stood, the ice maker grinding to a halt behind them.
“Hey, sorry to bother you, I was thinking you live on my street. Well I’m house-sitting, actually, so, where your neighbors live. I’m Vivian.”
“Vivian,” he hesitated, “Hey. I’m Ronny.”
“Yeah,” Vivian said, for no reason.
Ronny nodded, thought about something. “You’re staying in the house across the street then. I heard about that, the professor.”
“I moved in a few days ago,” she nodded.
Ronny had never met the professor. Paul and Helen had only lived on that street for about a year, a little more than the time Ronny had been gone. He remembered the moving trucks back then, and he remembered the cop cars that came a few weeks ago, started showing up in the mornings, one undercover and one squad.
His manner was quiet and a little distracted or preoccupied with something else, more than that lobby and whatever she would manage to say next. He was only vaguely interested, not committed to the details, she could tell. Ronny wore a brown sweater, had longish hair that was growing shaggy. There was something familiar and withdrawn about his face, and careless, the beginning of a beard. A patch sewn in wrong over his pants knee. He was slim, but rugged, like a boat maker. Like a boat maker who rose early, heaved planks for hours at the lip of the river and didn’t own a TV.
“Well,” he said, a suggestion they should move on. An usher was locking the bank of doors behind them; a manager carried a clipboard back to the registers. It was late.
Outside he paused to light a cigarette. He wasn’t supposed to have a lighter. But you could get your hands on anything. You got by. He needed to go back and check the place out but with Vivian following him . . . He took a long drag and started walking home. She fell in slightly behind.
“How’d you know where I was staying?” Vivian said to the back of his sweater.
He shrugged. She watched the orange spark between his fingers lift back and forth.
“Saw you the other day,” he said, “Taking the newspaper in.”
She nodded. So he’d noticed her. It was an idea she felt in her stomach: she wasn’t the only one paying attention, or hadn’t been. He was obviously in a hurry to do something,