out of the library in Baltimore because the promise on its cover seemed like good SAT prep. “Increase your vocab acumen exponentially!” When she had to leave town, Ana jammed the tape into her pocket before walking away from her home, her mother, her friends, her life she’d built with all her days. But, hey, at least she wouldn’t have any library fines.
Convergence, said the voice. The state of separate elements coming together.
The phone was ringing again. Ana turned up the volume on the tape player. She’d listened to the tape so many times the words had stopped making sense, though once in a while they made a new kind of sense. Just now, they were background noise, soothing as surf. Her eyelids flickered and she pictured herself on the cliffs of Malibu, enjoying the salt breeze, listening to a courtly Spaniard introduce characters from an old Greek tragedy. It was the tale of Perfidious and Lachrymose. Those two kids might have been happy if not for that old devil, Deleterious.
* * *
There are things the Program can change, and things that can’t be changed.
The Program couldn’t do anything, for example, about the fact that Ana was seventeen, a junior in high school. Or that she was tall enough to look most men in the eye, and not too shy to do so. She was narrow but solid, like a Doric column.
The Program has sent a few witnesses in for plastic surgery, but it wasn’t warranted in this case. A few easy alterations were enough to make the Easterdays unrecognizable. For Ana, it was a matter of subtraction. They bobbed her hair and stripped out the highlights, and the end result was a drab shade she thought of as Mouse Poop.
No tanning beds in Morocco, Indiana, and the only sun she saw came through the plate-glass window of Karen’s Kitchen where she waited tables, so by the end of the summer her complexion had faded beyond peaches and cream and was now more like milk flecked with dirt. She felt as plain and worn as an old undershirt. Her disguise, in short, was her natural state.
Then there are things that can be changed, but the Program elects not to change. A piece or two of their old lives for witnesses to cling to.
Ana was always her name.
It wasn’t a kindness, letting her keep her first name. Merely a practicality. Hesitate when someone calls your name, and that invites questions. Questions breed suspicion; suspicion leads to exposure.
The real trick of reinvention is to change a person enough to make her new, but not so much she becomes unrecognizable to herself.
* * *
Ana awoke in the laundry nest to the sound of her alarm blaring upstairs. The storm was muttering in the distance. Wrapping an old beach towel around her shoulders for warmth, she made her way up to the kitchen, where she peered through a ragged peephole her father had cut in a roller shade. Sunrise was an hour away, but the yard was lit up by the twin halogens of a security light. Through the peephole she could see the shingle tab driveway winding down to the road like a black river of forgetting. The rustbucket Fairlane her father hadn’t driven in a month. The thistle and volunteer sunflowers in the yard her father had mowed once, just after moving in, then never again. Out there in this new meadow, at the edge of the light, was the tall red oak.
And something else, too. Something new. Midway between the farmhouse and the oak, standing in the rain-bent grass, was an armoire.
* * *
An obituary for her old life: Ana grew up in Fells Point and went to Mount Carmel and worked as a hostess in her father’s restaurant in the evenings. She loved jangly bracelets, five or six on each wrist. “What’s up, slut?” was the way she greeted her friend Danielle. She considered canned mandarin oranges the perfect food, practiced dance moves in her bedroom mirror, and consistently tied up the phone until her mother surrendered and gave Ana her own line. Ana was personally responsible for the school-wide ban on hairbrushes because she’d popped Bobby Swenson in the lips with the back of a fat wooden brush after he cheated on Danielle.
Like a lot of teenagers, she had the feeling this wasn’t her real life; this was some kind of pre-life, a training module. When did she think real life would start? After high school, of course. After she moved out of her parents’ house. When she went to college. The old world had to die for a new one to be born.
And it did. Just not the way she thought it would.
Her old life ended the night someone pried open a window in her home and rolled a bomb into her parents’ bedroom. Her father was rushed to the ER, where he was inducted into the Witness Protection Program as a nurse picked shrapnel from his face and right arm The marshals wanted to get him out of town before someone came to finish the job, so before the sun rose they drove him and Ana to their home in a cargo van and gave them each a Hefty bag and fifteen minutes to pack.
One marshal stayed in the van with the engine running and a gun in his hand while another marshal escorted Ana to her bedroom, telling her not to pack anything with her old name on it. No pictures, no awards. Nothing that could be traced back to her old life. She kept stuffing yearbooks and ticket stubs and concert tees into the bag and the marshal kept pulling them out, saying, No, no, it’s for your own good, oh hell no.
She stopped packing. She sat on her bed and looked at the cordless phone on her nightstand. She wanted to call her mother, but what could she say? Come with us? Sorry for what I said in the ER? Goodbye, maybe forever? Ana thought the marshal would stop her from picking up the phone, but he didn’t. This was a surprise until she clicked talk. No dial tone.
“You never know who might be listening in,” said the marshal. “The wrong guy hears you’re leaving town, all of a sudden we got a goddamn scene.”
Like this wasn’t one already.
Ana pulled a pillow to her chest and began rocking in place. The marshal softened. “Look,” he said. “In a couple of weeks, we’ll send along your furniture. That’s something, isn’t it?”
When she buried her face in the pillow, the marshal probably thought she was crying, but she wasn’t. Not just then. She was breathing in her home, breathing herself. Then the marshal in the van blew the horn and time ran out on this goddamn scene, the last one in her old world.
* * *
Like most of their outsized furniture, the armoire wouldn’t fit in the cramped rooms of the farmhouse. Her father couldn’t bring himself to let it go, though, so he’d stowed it in the outbuilding. After months of sheltering mice from the leaky roof, it was no surprise that the armoire was warped and gray. But why was it standing in the middle of the yard like a cheap magician’s prop? Or like something from a bizarre horror story: But an armoire, once loved, can never truly be cast off. It will find its way back to its owner. And when it gets there…
Ana stepped onto the swaybacked porch. Fat drops of water trembled from the overhang. “Dad?” she called out to the yard. “This shit is not funny.”
Back home, her father had been a tender wiseass, a charm monster. He couldn’t pass her hostess stand at the Tip Top Lounge without delivering a wry joke or a cup of coffee, or pulling a stack of singles from the register to play Liar’s Poker. Ana never beat him, but sometimes she found a roll of bills stuffed into her coat pocket at the end of her shift anyway.
Pulling the beach towel tight around her shoulders, she stepped into the yard and sucked in her breath when her feet touched the wet grass. “Dad?” she called again, hoping against hope to see him come around the outbuilding with some explanation about a yard sale or a bonfire and ask her why the heck she was traipsing around the yard in her bare feet. Didn’t she know she could step on a rusty nail and get tetanus? Risk versus reward, Bug. Then he’d tip his head to the side and say, Though if you got lockjaw, it would be kind of peaceful around here.
That fantasy flickered out like the tail end of a filmstrip. He wasn’t that guy anymore. And whatever was happening with this armoire, it wasn’t a joke. As she waded through the long grass, the image that came to mind was her father inside the armoire, small and naked and curled up like a bean.
She