you’re wasting away to nothing.”
Once on the train, I closed my eyes and didn’t look back.
My sister had bought me a ticket on the Keystone to Pennsylvania—a daylong trip from Penn Station. I slept mostly. We passed into New Jersey, following the water, steely and gray. I didn’t talk to anyone, or move when the conductor came through, calling for lunch reservations. I wasn’t hungry. When the train stopped after Elizabethtown, at the most desolate, busted place I could imagine, I stood. This was the stop. I knew it. After all, I had been here before.
When our parents died, the Firecracker was fifteen—my age now—too young to take care of me herself. I tried to imagine my sister like me, in school, wearing toe shoes around her neck, her long hair in a ponytail. I couldn’t picture it, not really. I was five then, and we moved in with our grandmother, our mother’s mother, for three years until my sister was legal, could drop out of school and get a job, get a place for us back in the city where we belonged, she said.
I knew the blandness, the brokenness of this place, I had been here and escaped from it once already. Wellstone.
The conductor called the name of the town, but I was the only one who got out. The train huffed away, and I was left. Outside on the platform, under an overhang, I sat on a bench to wait.
Wellstone was a punishment, like my grandmother was a punishment. My sister had used both of them as idle threats for years. If I didn’t do better in school, if I didn’t come home on time, if I didn’t stop talking back, she would send me here, to Wellstone, where there were no malls or coffee shops or stores that stayed open past five o’clock or kids my own age or anything to do.
There were also rumors about this town, stories which I could still remember bits of: something about a man in the woods; bones in the weeds; places where kids were afraid to play. This was not a good place, I knew that much.
My grandmother didn’t have internet. She didn’t have a computer. She didn’t have cable. She lived in an old, rambling mansion that was falling down. It wasn’t safe, I remembered. Once, my foot had fallen through a stair. Rain had fallen through the ceiling. The Firecracker had cried a lot.
But in New York, after they had pulled me from the tunnel, my sister had made plans, secretly and instantly. There were three weeks left of school, and she had arranged for me to be transferred. The school in Wellstone had emailed a schedule. They were expecting me.
Grandma was the only family we had left, the last resort for me.
I didn’t even know if I would know her face. She was quiet and terrifying, I remembered that much. She kept cats with no tails who roamed freely in and out of the house. There was a barn I wasn’t allowed to go into. There was a big black bag she carried that I wasn’t allowed to touch.
My grandmother had worked the night shift, as a nurse or something. She had cooked strange things, nearly inedible things, bubbling stews and simmering broths, which she left hissing on the stove all day. The house smelled of herbs and dried flowers and dust and spice and boiling chickens. She kept the bones. The cats played with them.
On the train platform, I shivered. I checked for reception on my phone. I waited. And I waited. I had started to fall asleep when I heard a car. I sat up and reached for my suitcases.
My grandmother came around the corner of the station. I hadn’t seen her for seven years. She was smaller than I remembered, and she wore glasses, the kind with a beaded chain. She walked heavily and slowly, as though it hurt her. She stepped up to the platform and looked across.
I didn’t run to her. I didn’t shout. I wasn’t going to hug her. I decided to stay very still. I decided to look like it didn’t matter; I didn’t care.
She turned, and without a word to me, began to walk back to her car.
“Grandma?” I said, but my voice felt thick. I wasn’t sure she had heard me. By the time I had gathered up my bags, the car was starting. “Grandma, no!” I left the suitcases and ran into the parking lot.
Her car, a station wagon, was just disappearing up the road.
I dialed my phone. “Grandma left me,” I said when my sister picked up.
“Why are you calling me at work?”
“She left me.”
“Where?” my sister said.
“At the train station.”
“Well, was your train late?”
“No.”
“I’m sure it’s a mistake,” the Firecracker said. “A misunderstanding.”
I remembered her raging about our grandmother, about her strangeness, her habits. Eccentric was the word the Firecracker used, which, as a child, I had thought was electric; I kept waiting for our grandmother to light up like a Christmas tree.
“You know where she lives,” my sister said.
“No, I don’t.”
“Well, you have the address. And you remember the house.”
“Yes,” I said.
I couldn’t forget the house.
I hung up the phone, hoisted my suitcases, and started up the hill to the road. Soon a truck passed me, a group of bare-chested boys hanging out in the bed. Wellstone boys. I thought about hitchhiking, though the Firecracker would kill me if she found out, but the truck didn’t slow.
I began to remember the way. Past the gas station and fairgrounds. There was the hill. There was the road, the driveway cracked and steep. I tightened my grip on the suitcases and started up. The driveway veered, and there was the house: glowering from on top of the hill. The house was three stories, mostly brick, and over a hundred years old. It had belonged to someone important. It had been passed down. It had a name—but I couldn’t remember what it was.
I passed my grandmother’s station wagon parked in front of the collapsing barn. When the driveway ended, I dragged my suitcases through the grass, tearing through the weeds to get around the house. The grass hadn’t been mowed in a long time, and there were tree limbs down all over the yard. Wide steps led to a front porch and double doors, thrown wide open to the afternoon. When I walked up the steps, four blurs shot out of the doors and down, yowling.
Cats. My grandmother fed a whole herd of them, all tailless. Manx, I remembered they were called.
“Scat!” I told them. I dropped my suitcases on the porch and knocked at the open door. “Grandma?” I called.
No one answered.
I went inside.
I hadn’t remembered how high the ceilings of the house were, how the wooden floors echoed. I peeked in the doorway of the first room to my left: empty, except for bookshelves and a piano. The room on the right, the dining room, had a heavy oak table in the center, drapes drawn shut over the windows, and a fireplace, the marble mantle cluttered with candles. There were candles on the floor in the hallway too, all dusty and blackened, burned down to nubs.
A ballroom stood on the third floor, I remembered now—I had roller skated there. A big staircase led up to it, but I kept walking down the hall. I came to a smaller set of stairs, the servant steps. To my right was the kitchen. To my left was the sitting room where my grandmother waited for me, watching television with the sound off.
“Grandma?” I whispered.
Blue light flickered over her face. It was her. She was the same, only shrunken, only not speaking to me for some reason.
“I’m here,” I said.
She didn’t say anything.
“Esmé? Jennifer’s daughter?”
It hurt to say my mother’s name. Not hurt exactly. It felt forbidden, like a spell. It felt like I shouldn’t speak her name aloud. I wished