“Thank you.”
“And stop calling me X.”
End of call.
He knew it too well, that sometimes lost stayed lost. He’d learned it all kinds of hard ways since the day he found his mother’s ring in the drain. He was estranged from his brother; they all were. After years of trying to reel him back from addiction, help him to manage his mental illness, they finally had to let him go. No one knew where he was. Bailey knew his mother never stopped looking. But Bailey had.
When lost wants to stay lost, sometimes you have no choice but to let it go.
He sat. He had a gift for that, sitting and breathing, being totally present, the watcher. The world came alive—he was aware of his breath, the squirrel running up the tree to his left, the glow of Wren’s lights, the light that came on and went off on her neighbor’s third floor, the man walking his little dog, talking on his phone, the man who rode by on his bike, music blaring from a speaker, the laundromat owner pulling down his gate for the night.
Then at ten minutes after midnight, he watched a slim form move hurriedly up the street and climb Wren’s front stoop. For a moment, a brief electric flash of hope, he thought he might get lucky. Adam Harper returning in the night. He checked his glove box for his gun. A 9 mm Glock sat flat and dark in the mess of napkins, and papers, a crushed pack of cigarettes, some packs of Black Jack gum. A Snickers bar, a tangled mass of headphones. Well, maybe he had not grown fastidious exactly. His mom would be mad. Bailey! Clean that up!
He looked back at the stoop.
No. It wasn’t Adam Harper—Bailey would have to think of him as that moving forward. It was the best friend, another pretty, smart, young professional woman who, from what he’d gleaned, for some reason didn’t seem to get the dangers of online dating. From her body language, he’d say she was in crisis. She let herself inside. And then everything was quiet again.
He waited. All night. Wren Greenwood was it, his last connection to Mia Thorpe.
So, when she left her town house early in the morning, the friend still inside, Bailey Kirk followed.
PART TWO
rewilding
I want to unfold.
Let no place in me hold itself closed,
For where I am closed, I am false.
Rainer Maria Rilke
eighteen
melissa
Melissa Farrow had always, always been fascinated by fire. She loved the way it danced on the air, twisting and writhing, reaching and flickering. She didn’t understand why more people didn’t seem to notice what a tiny miracle of science an open flame was. Only under the right conditions could it be made, could it survive. It was fragile; the slightest breath could extinguish it. It was a roaring destructive beast, able to fell buildings. Her father could snuff a match with a calloused thumb and forefinger. But if the flame from the stove or the fireplace found its way to your skin, to your clothes, it would devour you.
The first time her mother caught her with matches, she was trying to light a pile of dead leaves her father had raked into the corner of the yard. She was ten and she wanted so badly to see those leaves go up in a tower of flames, a bonfire like the one she’d seen on the beach during a family vacation to the Jersey Shore. A great tower of light reaching into the starry sky, roaring and crackling, but so safely contained that people moved close with marshmallows on the ends of long sticks to make s’mores. She remembered how her mother held on to the collar of her shirt as she and her father inched closer, reaching out their sticks.
Be careful, Mom said, her voice tight with worry.
She’s okay, her father said gently, looking down at Melissa.
Melissa wasn’t afraid at all. The sound of it, a kind of wind, the heat on her face like a mask. At night sometimes she dreamed about it.
There was a big box of matches in the drawer in the kitchen. Her parents used them to light the fireplace, candles on the dinner table, or when the pilot light went out in the oven or the furnace.
The matches in a blue box were thick, with big red heads. A simple, quick strike, an expert flick of the wrist and the end ignited, a tiny dancer, a miniature explosion.
Melissa took the box. Her father was at work; her mother was on the phone. She’d been thinking of that pile of leaves since the weekend, imagining what it would be like in flames, how it would smell. She wondered if there were marshmallows in the cabinet. There were. She took the box, the bag of marshmallows. She’d find a stick in the yard. That was the real way, her father said, not those fancy, extra-long skewers they gave you at the hotel.
Out in the yard, the air was cool and the sky was a bright blue. She was off school because of some teacher in-service day and parent conferences that night.