the button. Before contacting him, she had to create an account. Under Profile Name, she opted for her chat room moniker: La Mujer. She filled in Indianapolis, IN for location and added nothing else.
In the blank message box, she typed:
Mike,
I hope you remember me, though Mexico was a long time ago. I need to talk to you. Ben was in the news today—they found his passport. Maybe you heard about it, or saw the photo stuck on top of Ben’s. This is totally surreal.
Write me.
Carey
Soon, she thought. Now. She clicked around the site for a few minutes, learning Nicole had completed her profile with very sincere, paragraph-length responses, and included a glamour-shot picture of herself dancing in a black leotard and flimsy skirt. She left Nicole’s page and hit refresh multiple times but there was no reply. She switched off the computer and pushed the warm laptop to the other side of the bed.
She slept, dreaming of nothing. Or dreaming of Ben, who cradled her head in his hands, gazing down at her. Her sleeping mind, more present than waking life. The dreams happened like real time. Her arms moved as if underwater. Her hair blew like a fashion model’s in front of a fan. He stood there with a camera, wearing a once-white T-shirt coated in what looked like blood, but he reassured her: No, it’s only ketchup. Taste. She leaned forward. Licked.
The next morning, a smattering of her own blood speckled the pillow and crusted beneath her fingernails, the back of her head a small mess of scrapes. This happened every few months. Her scalp stung under the hot water of the shower. Eventually the water rinsed clear. Seven years of these dreams: often enough that they felt routine. Each time, she tried to remember the plot of her sleeping stories, made hazy and polluted by her waking mind, but she couldn’t. Wouldn’t.
After throwing on jeans and an old track t-shirt, she meandered downstairs and stepped on the nail sticking out of the loose floorboard at the bottom of the stairs, which made a small red dent in her insole but didn’t break the skin. The coffee percolated, frozen waffles sprung from the toaster. Out the kitchen window, small buds populated the forsythia; a robin perched, placid, on the empty feeder. She’d lost her job, but she didn’t have to pay rent. She had a window to look out of. An empty, quiet house, now hers for eight hours.
The Halperns’ house had been built in the late sixties, and the neighborhood abutted the marshy area near Eagle Creek, in the suburbs on the city’s far Northwestside. Despite weekly visits from a cleaning woman, a damp, moldering smell remained. The décor was impeccable. Even the old items in her parents’ house appeared new, a catalog home. Things to be admired but not touched, as she’d been admonished her entire life. She twined her bare feet on the stool’s rungs, glancing over the newspaper’s comics, her horoscope. “Taurus: No matter how intense the mood between you and a loved one, courageously communicate your feelings.”
Carey had taken the phone off the hook in case the temp agency called before her parents left for work. Daytime TV shocked her with its dullness; the suspense of game shows displayed only the guilelessness of the contestants. The second Iraq war, now one month in, had not hampered Americans’ right to compete for valuable prizes on national television. Solitaire on her father’s computer lasted an hour, his high scores unbeatable. She took the want ads to her room. Rather than read them, she spread the newsprint on the carpet and painted her neglected toenails a deep crimson. Still no reply from Mike Gibley, and though it had been less than twenty-four hours, she resented his silence, assigning it meaning and weight.
In the early evening, to keep up the ruse of gainful employment, she changed into work clothes: black pants, a cream mohair sweater, and nylon trouser socks. Her toenail polish had not fully set and the socks kept sticking. No family dinner that night, just the low rumblings of her parents’ voices, a quiet fight in her father’s office. She made a sandwich with leftover chicken, spooning globs of mayonnaise to counter the dryness. She waited for someone to bear witness to her office apparel. The sweater shed its fur. Her lap was covered in a fine coat of cream fuzz; she’d have to borrow a lint roller.
The house was silent. A parental impasse. She grew tired of waiting. At the foot of the stairs, she snagged her sock on the loose nail in the floorboard. Carey lifted her foot to check for a wound, and tore a gaping hole through the thin material.
In her room she lifted the laptop lid for the thirty-seventh time that day and refreshed TheOldSchool.com’s website.
Carey,
Do I remember you? Jesus H. Christ. I actually looked you up but didn’t realize I needed a secret code. La Mujer, then. OK. Yes. Sure. Anyway, Carey (or cruel joke-playing person), I’m coming down to Indy this weekend to visit Ben’s parents. We’ll talk then. No excuses, mujer. Pretty please.
I want to see you.
Gibs
He left three different phone numbers where he could be reached. Carey’s heart thudded in her ears. Through the computer, Mike Gibley appeared in her room, floating in the air, in her memory. She’d found him. He’d returned.
All that we long to suppress does.
Chapter 2
It was late when they finally arrived at the exchange school that interminably hot August. The bus ride took more than five hours from the Mexico City airport. In the capital the traffic oozed like lava, allowing Carey plenty of time to translate the billboards for ice cream and sex shops and telenovelas. A Plexiglass case housed a bullet-proof statue of an indistinguishable saint, perched on the high stone wall of a bodega. Green Volkswagen bug taxis swarmed the streets. For sale on the sidewalk: reclining, reconditioned automobile seats. Nearly forty minutes after entering the Capital, the bus emerged from the Districto Federal’s perpetual smog cloud, and Andrea Cunningham, the American program director, pointed out they were heading the wrong way.
Cesár had driven south to Cuernavaca before turning west. Outside of the city, he explained, the day was shaping up to be clear and they’d have a good view of the volcanoes. You couldn’t count on that happening again, he told Andrea, who’d been checking her watch. The bus’s broken door hinge squeaked and the door swung open when Cesár rounded a corner. Pairs of American eyes followed the door’s movement.
“Ees OK,” the bus driver told Andrea. She frowned briefly then tried a chipper expression, murmuring about locking the door. Cesár just shook his head. Held his palms up and shrugged.
Later, while the other students were dozing or plugged into music, Carey paid attention when Cesár spoke.
“La mujer,” he said.
Carey looked up and caught his eye in the rearview mirror. He pointed out the window at the mountains while driving one-handed on the curving road. “La mujer dormida.”
The sleeping woman, Carey translated. A rolling stretch of mountain, purple in the dusk against a darkening sky, curved like a woman asleep on her side. An unbreakable, impenetrable mold of breast, a hint of hip, feet. A sleep carved from rock hundreds of thousands of years ago. The Sleeping Woman was the oldest, most constant thing Carey had ever seen.
She did not yet know that the woman had a name, Ixtaccihuatl, or the myth that she was a princess who died from sorrow, falsely believing her lover had died in battle. Carey would learn that when the warrior returned and found the princess dead, he built her a pyramid, watching over her from the twin peak nearby. In the winter, glaciers formed on her breasts. Beneath, buried deep in her core, the molten life of a volcano bided time.
Carey wished for her camera, packed in her luggage below, though she knew the motion of the bus and the lighting and the film speed would blur any attempt to capture something as beautiful as the Sleeping Woman.
A pair of students began singing in Spanish; Carey understood only half the words. When she next looked out the window, the shape in the mountains had disappeared.
Carey’s head ached from altitude changes as the bus bumped