sometimes even tell me it’s fine, that you’re just happy I’m still doing well and had a good day. But the look on your face now is so much worse. I’d rather have a hundred thousand fights than see that look on your face again. Well, I guess I won’t have to anymore.
Okay, stop being grim. I’m off topic.
I remember grabbing a jar of spaghetti sauce mid-count when I first noticed it. The strange stillness in the room. It was always so still when only I was home, but this was stillness of a different quality. It was full of something, rather than absent.
I looked down at my shadow there on the floor, and because of the light from that little window, it was perfectly stretched out in front of me. We were the exact same height and shape. There was no distortion from the angle of the sun or a bump in the floor or a wall that might have cut into the silhouette. We matched exactly. Perfectly. Down to the eyelash.
I lifted up the jar, and so did my shadow. We both leaned over and set the sauces on the counters, and returned our hands to rest at our sides. It was like I could feel that something was about to happen. Like I shouldn’t look away.
Then something did. This is going to sound absolutely crazy, but I swear it’s true.
I was holding perfectly still, under the spell of that feeling, just watching my shadow. It was looking back at me, in the same pose, waiting.
Then I saw it tilt its head ever so slightly to the side, all by itself.
There was a moment of coldness, like the entire room had dropped twenty degrees. I tried to take a breath, but I couldn’t move. Then it was gone.
I didn’t cry. Not that whole afternoon. Instead, I kept busy, taking inventory of our first-aid supplies, cleaning, making sure the window coverings were still secure, double-checking that we had sufficient shotgun ammunition, cleaning and resetting the game trap. I felt like there were so many things to make sure of, and so little time. Like it was all going to end that same night, and I’d just vanish too, forever. I kept spinning around to look behind me, to see if maybe I’d been mistaken, that the sun had just disappeared behind some clouds for a second, or I simply had cabin fever. But it didn’t matter how many times I looked or how many different directions I shone our spare flashlight on my hand. I couldn’t make a silhouette against any surface. In the light on the wall, the plastic cylinder looked like it was floating in midair all by itself, careening wildly about, pointing every which angle. As soon as I noticed, I put it down immediately. I couldn’t touch it again.
I forgot to start dinner. Instead, I shook out the winter clothes in the storage trunk so they wouldn’t have moth holes in them by the time we needed them. I still didn’t cry.
Even when I went back in the kitchen and saw that jar still sitting on the counter, and its own twin still painted darkly on the floor, I still didn’t cry.
Not until after it had gotten dark, and I heard your key in the door.
THAT NIGHT, THE NIGHT THE FORGETTING REACHED BOSTON, Naz had spent the afternoon out on the range with her coach, but every shot was terrible. She bungled them one after another for so many hours that finally he cut the practice short, and told her to head home and go to sleep early. Naz knew something was really off when she didn’t argue with him about getting soft on her, for once. Her mind just wasn’t there. It was like she knew something was coming. It’s in your DNA, her mother would have said. They say that DNA has a memory, too. That the things that happen to a people are passed down. Naz would have told her that was nonsense. If they hadn’t disowned each other so long ago.
When the Forgetting hit, after dark, it surprised Naz that her mother was who she thought of first. Then she thought, I can’t. She’d kept her promise never to speak to her again—since the last time she’d visited Tehran. Her mother had, too. Outside, on the street below, she could hear people screaming in the night.
Naz picked up her cell phone. She had started seeing someone recently, maybe seriously. She didn’t know. She scrolled to his number, but her finger stalled, hovering over the screen. What did two and a half months mean, really? Fourteen dates, five lays, eighteen glasses of wine, one drive to the airport for a weekend trip. He hadn’t reached out for Naz. There was no message flashing urgently in the blue glow of her screen. It was all right, though. Naz understood. There were other people who mattered more, to them both.
The call didn’t go through the first time. Naz was sure everyone who hadn’t lost their shadow was busy calling everyone who had. She hung up and immediately dialed again. She was ready to leave a voice mail. I just wanted to say I’m okay, that’s all. Something like that. She was surprised when her mother picked up.
“Are you safe?” Her mother was sobbing. It was disorienting—to listen as things that used to matter so much evaporated. What filled their empty places to justify all that lost time? Naz was scrambling for her shoes and wallet. Would a $15,000 charge even go through on her credit card? She couldn’t remember how to get to the airport, what freeway.
It didn’t matter. They’d closed Boston airport, her mother told her. She’d seen it on the news. Naz couldn’t go home. “Are you safe? Tell me you’re safe,” her mother pleaded.
Naz told her she was okay. Everything was slowly draining out of her. When she’d needed to be brave for someone else a moment ago, it was one thing. But it was hard to be brave for just herself. She backed away from the windows, sank to the carpet. Red and blue alternating flashes passed on the street outside, casting ghostly streaks across the ceiling. I have to get out of the city, Naz thought, at the same moment that her mother was telling her they’d quarantined it, that they were shooting people trying to break the line. “Turn on your damn TV, Mahnaz!” she shouted.
The president’s face flashed up in front of her, alongside helicopter feeds of various neighborhoods. Naz even saw her own.
“What should I do?” she asked her mother. “Should I go upstairs or go in the basement?”
“No!” her mother cried. “You have to leave the house. Now. Anyone could find you there, because that’s where you’re supposed to be.”
Boston was a place where her mother’s paranoid advice had stopped terrifying Naz long ago. It was a place where no one made two extra turns on the way anywhere, to lose a tail. Where no one memorized license plates. Where no one had a secret hiding place in the hall closet. It was a place where Naz had all the answers, and her mother would flounder embarrassingly on the sidewalk, gaping at the things teenagers carelessly shouted, the crop tops, the virtual reality demos at pop-up game booths on Newbury Street. But this wasn’t the Boston Naz knew anymore, and her mother had lived this life before. She had learned a world where one had to know what to do if people were being killed, if someone might be coming to find you. Naz felt herself nodding vigorously at her mother’s words.
“Where can you go that no one will think to look? Somewhere that wouldn’t be worth checking.”
That’s how Naz ended up living in her perhaps-boyfriend’s music studio.
SHE FIGURED, NO SERIOUS STORES OF FOOD, NO WEAPONS, no camping or survival supplies. A vacant, soundproof studio inside of a nondescript commercial warehouse was about as unattractive a target as possible. Why would anyone go there to try to wait out the chaos that was happening outside?
Naz dumped everything in her pantry, everything in the top drawer of her dresser, her toiletries, and her bow and quiver into a duffel bag.
“Do you see anyone? Are you there yet?” her mother asked.
“Please stop talking,” Naz begged. She’d put the Bluetooth earpiece in her ear and clipped the phone to her belt holster so her mother could stay with her as she sprinted down every side street she could find to reach the