NOMADS

Mike Nees

Through the kitchen window, Camille watches her children smack each other with pool noodles. When her husband enters the pool, and they turn their sights on him, it’s a massacre. He needs backup, she decides. Abandoning the work email she should’ve ignored anyway, she jogs upstairs for a swimsuit. But as she reaches for the dresser, her phone buzzes—it’s Linda, her stepmom. Linda never calls out of the blue. Camille’s chest tightens. Mom found a lump, she thinks. Or Mom fell off the wagon. Mom joined an MLM. They prey on people just like Mom.

“Your Mom’s fine!” Linda says. “She’s out salvaging what’s left of the banana peppers. We have to do something about the voles. I talked her out of poison, at least.”

A wave of gratitude washes over Camille. What would she do without Linda? They make small talk until her impatience gets the best of her. “Is everything okay?” 

“Everything’s okay…” Linda sounds like she’s walking into another room. “…I was just wondering if you’ve talked to your sister lately?”

“I guess it’s been a while.”

“I don’t want to violate her privacy,” Linda says. “But she’s been looking kind of rough. Like she’s been missing sleep.”

“She is a night owl.”

“Well, I wanted to run this by you, too. The other day, I drove to the waste center to drop off some recycling, and I saw her in the distance, climbing out of the landfill. I thought she looked really upset. The way you see homeless people, sometimes, just storming around in public. Oh, that sounds terrible, doesn’t it?” Through the bedroom window, Camille watches her son stamp around the pool, noodle held like an elephant’s trunk. “I don’t know,” Linda adds. “Your mom says she must’ve been rummaging for things to use in her sculptures? But it didn’t look like that to me. Just wondering if you’d have any thoughts about it.” Camille’s son dips his trunk in the pool, sprays water into the grass. “You both used to work there, right? At the waste center?” Linda’s cheerful pitch doesn’t falter. “With your mom?”

“We did,” Camille says. As her son refills his trunk, the dog trots up to him, snaps at the water when he lets it rip. Nearby, her husband and daughter are still locked in a duel. She feels her weekend splitting away from theirs. “I can drive up tomorrow to check on her.”

“Oh no, it’s such a long ride. Four hours, isn’t it? I’d hate for you to do that. You could just call her, couldn’t you?” No, Camille thinks. The alarm has been tripped. There’s no silencing it now. 

*

At fourteen, Camille wouldn’t have described the un-mowed acre of weeds around her house as chaotic. Mom knew where to expect which vegetables in the summer, and Dad had his plans for the broken slot machines in the pigweed—each would be a limb in the monster he was welding, Slotzilla. He would sell it to Ripley’s someday, or else display it on the lawn for the Weird NJ crowd. He was at his worktable the morning he fell, fusing the metallic big toe onto what would’ve been its left foot. Nearby, in one of the less-buggy patches of grass, Camille had just bested her sister Eva in a game of Uno. She said “Uno,” looked up from the cards, and noticed Dad lowering himself to the ground. For a second, it just seemed odd. Then his knees buckled, and the welding gun slipped from his hand.

They all worked together lifting him into the Camry. Mom didn’t believe in calling 911. She shouted at the girls to stay home, cursed as they forced their way into the car with her. “Just drive,” Camille begged from the backseat. She watched Dad’s chest rise and fall beside her. This made her feel better. His breath. But it grew shallow after a minute, and imperceptible after another two or three. His shirt rode up as the people in scrubs transferred him onto a stretcher, revealing the new shape of his abdomen: a Capri Sun sucked dry. 

He died of sudden internal bleeding, according to the doctor. Mom would have none of it. “Where’s the blood?” she howled. “If he bled to death, where’d it go?” Camille squeezed her hand, but everything the doctor said just made Mom more upset. How the blood might not be in the body anymore. 

“A portal could’ve opened in one of his arteries,” the doctor said.

“A portal to where?”

“It’s hard to say. I’m sure you’ve heard about them. They just found one in Syracuse that goes to Florida. Big one.” Camille was only vaguely aware of the phenomenon, but she was young enough to accept it at face value. It was different for Mom. Mom spent the days that followed seeking corroboration from anyone she could. The mailman, the gas attendant. You heard of these things? You believe in this?

It seemed everyone had heard about portals but Mom.

The examiner’s office called later that week to say they found it in Dad’s neck, the portal, but that it was too small for their scope. They offered to rent a smaller scope for some staggering fee. Camille had no idea how her family would survive without Dad, how her life would change—of all the questions plaguing her, the location of his blood didn’t even register. But Mom couldn’t stand the mystery. That pinhole through which he’d seeped—she needed to know where it led. She refused to sign off on burial or cremation. Her obsession infected Eva, who pestered Camille with her theories: “Maybe his blood rained down in the woods. And now he’s in the dirt, making stuff grow. Weird, Dad stuff.” 

“That’s actually really stupid.”

“Maybe his blood is floating in space.”

“I’ll play Uno if you stop talking about Dad’s blood.” 

That summer Mom got deep into scratch-offs. God had dealt them an excruciating blow—by her logic, they were due for a big hit. The crumpled-up tickets seemed to multiply on their own. No matter how often Camille emptied the kitchen garbage, it brimmed with them. As she rummaged through the upper cabinets one night, looking for the candy Mom sometimes hid there, she noticed Eva below her, fishing an unscratched ticket out from under the fridge. Camille climbed down and snatched it up before she could get any ideas. “These are evil,” she said.

Eva shot her a glare. “I’m not stupid.”

“I never called you stupid.”

Eva brooded anyway. She asked where they’d go if they had to move. The question plagued Camille as well—though Mom had her job sorting trash at the waste center, it was Dad’s income as a slot mechanic that had always paid the bills. Now, on top of their mortgage and utilities, they incurred months of storage fees from the funeral home, and a collector kept calling about the hospital bill. “We’ll be nomads,” Camille said.

When she booted up the computer in the living room, hoping to find a friend on AIM, the screen flashed a message about being shut down improperly. She’d seen Mom unplug it out of impatience before. This time, after clicking Restore Programs, a browser opened to Mom’s job search. She was supposed to be looking for better-paying work. The last message was two months old. 

“She stopped job hunting.” 

“Let’s just do it for her,” Eva said. “There’s got to be something.” 

It wasn’t the worst idea, Camille thought. She heard Mom drunk-snoring down the hall, out for the night. But scrolling through the positions, Camille couldn’t imagine her in any of them. Everyone wanted someone who worked well with others. Someone with soft skills—a term she’d never heard of, but was sure excluded Mom. She searched until she found a part-time opening at the waste center, where Mom already worked. No experience necessary.

Camille had been there a few times. She knew herself to have a high tolerance for gross things, having cleaned out the meat freezer in the garage when the motor died. It wasn’t that hard to picture herself in one of those reflective green vests, shepherding trash from place to place.

The next morning, as Mom sat slumped over the kitchen table, dazed from the rum and Benadryl she’d taken to sleep, Camille made her proposal: help her lie about her age to the waste center and she’d help pay the bills. She’d been tallest in her class for years. At first Mom just shook her head. “It’s like you want the social worker to show up.” But after a moment she looked away, rubbed her temples. “How much does it pay?” 

Finally, Camille thought. Mom would face reality.

According to the state, the county built its landfill too close to the airport—trash attracts birds, birds fly into jet engines, and so one morning a supervisor handed Camille a flare gun and told her to fire into the air wherever she saw the flocks settle. Though she got dizzy on hot days, firing the gun offered moments of power. The gulls she’d shooed away from her funnel cake at the beach never flew more than a few feet before circling back. Now she had a weapon that struck fear in their hearts. How frantically they scattered when she’d pull the trigger.

The rest of the job, she tolerated. She held her own, she felt. But no matter how often she asked, Mom never gave her a sense of where things stood with the bills. “I don’t want you worrying about that,” she said one night, on the ride home from work. She pulled over for gas, went in to pay, and emerged with a fistful of Fast Cash tickets. 

Even with Camille’s help, the lights went out the following spring. For a month they lived by candlelight, unable to watch TV or blow-dry their hair. Mom bought tickets through it all. She let the storage fees at the funeral home pile up until they cremated Dad against her will. She never let anyone forget it.

After she passed out on Codeine one night, Camille answered the phone to find herself in an interrogation over Dad’s hospital bills. The collector was so loud, Eva peered up from her sketchpad. “I thought there was a thing for that,” she said, after Camille hung up on him. “Like charity care or something.”

“We already did that.” Camille’s voice shook. “It doesn’t pay for everything.” 

“There was a sign for it in the hospital.”

“I saw the fucking sign!” Camille was sure she could feel Eva glaring at her, but she looked up to find her sister’s eyes on the wall mirror. Her own reflection. She asked if Camille thought she could pass for 16, the minimum working age. For a moment, the prospect of a third stream of income pulled Camille out of her panic. “Yeah,” she said, studying Eva’s face. The readiness in her dark eyes. Camille felt a twitch of relief.  “You probably could.”

When they opened the Syracuse-to-Florida portal to the public, everyone started crowing about the search for more shortcuts, as if a Swiss cheese-world was something to celebrate. Camille did her best to ignore every mention of it. The new porousness of everything—she grew deeply trypophobic. She learned to focus on the minutiae of getting through each day.

Eva survived her first 30 days at the waste center without attracting too much scrutiny, despite how her mind would wander—you could see the landfill from most of the open-air buildings, and Eva’s eyes were drawn to its riotous shapes and colors. With the occasional nudge, she kept up with the adults. On the ride to work one morning, Mom went on forever praising her for it. The both of them. “My girls are so grown-up,” she said, red-eyed and hungover, fighting the Camry’s misalignment. “Just promise you don’t get comfortable here. You’re both too bright.” Her frizzy perm bounced along the speed bumps. “I’ll be damned if you don’t get to do whatever you want with your lives.” She was always saying stuff like this.

They started that day at the pre-sort belt, intercepting anything that could jam up the machines. Mom and Camille stood on one side of the belt, Eva and an old-timer on the other. The day’s perils included a never-ending VHS collection—the reels of tape would get tangled in the rollers, they were told, so each cassette had to be plucked from the flow of trash. Whenever Camille was sure they’d seen the last of them, another Land Before Time would slide into view. None of them saw the cassette go in, but Camille wasn’t surprised to hear it when the sorting machine finally ground to a halt. They ripped the tape from its mouth in silence until Vince, the old-timer, said “I told her these things are tanglers,” nodding at Eva. “This is why you don’t hire charity cases.”

Mom threw down her gloves. Vince balled up a mess of tape and threw it in her direction. It fluttered to the ground after only a few feet. “Wish you’d hurry up and win your fucking lotto,” he said. “I’m not a babysitter.” 

Eva hid her face as Mom hurled threats at him, each of which Vince promised to report. Camille was sure Mom would’ve gotten them all fired if she hadn’t held her back with both hands. They were split up for the day instead. Camille spent the rest of it spraying the goop out of plastics. When she clocked out, Eva was nowhere to be found. At the loading bay, her eyes rose to the storm clouds gathering outside. They’d grown darker over the course of the day, somehow brightening the trash below. The white waste in particular, that field of dead appliances, gleamed in the darkness. Hell would freeze over before anyone scrapped them, according to Mom. Gotta deal with that freon and shit like it’s radioactive. Camille pictured Eva brooding among the ovens and water heaters, attracting more unwanted attention. Her sister was mousy, defenseless. She was obviously underage. It would take only a little tug from someone like Vince for the whole charade to unravel. Camille plucked one of the bright green ponchos off the wall and strode out into the rain. 

She felt the mountain of trash looming over her as she looked for Eva. In a town as flat as theirs—below the water table, Dad would say—it seemed like an actual mountain. Examining it from every angle, she found no sign of her sister. Only after the crack of thunder, and a fresh hammering of rain, did she turn around to catch the flicker of bright green among the white waste. Eva’s poncho. Camille found her sitting against a fridge, face buried in her hands. The flare gun lay in the dirt at her feet. Camille picked it up, tucked it in the back of her jeans. “Did you clock out?” 

Eva shook her head. 

“That’s a write up. We need to be smarter than that.”

“Mom needs to be smarter.”

Struggling against the wind, a plague of grackles fluttered past them. “She’s not going to change,” Camille said. “You just have to grow up—she’s only going to need us more.”

Eva avoided her gaze. She watched the birds shelter in a row of washing machines. Though she wanted nothing to do with Eva’s self-pity, Camille felt her own eyes starting to water. She leaned back against a fridge across from Eva’s, lowered herself to the ground.

The next burst of thunder made all the grackles jump. In the corner of her eye, Camille saw them buzzing around a single, front-load washing machine. The door hung open an inch or two, just wide enough for the birds to slip inside. As more and more streamed into the machine, Eva looked transfixed. “How are they all fitting in there?” Camille just shook her head. Eva rose to her feet and approached the washer, bracing herself for a panicked swarm—but when she opened the door, nothing came out. Not one bird. Camille got up and stared into the machine’s empty hull with her, waiting for the explanation that didn’t come.

Eva’s face lit up. “It’s a portal.”

Camille tried not to hear it. She’d done her best to ignore every utterance of the word—but she couldn’t ignore Eva scrambling past her, into the machine. Camille grabbed her by the calf, but the soaked denim slipped through her fingers. In an instant, Eva was gone. Screaming after her, Camille got no response. 

Her head pounded. She crouched down again, leaned into the washer. It was empty.

Over the peeling rust and bird shit, she shimmied her way inside. She pointed a nervous finger at the back wall and poked it—her finger went right through. It felt like nothing, like air.

Wincing, she pushed her face through the wall. On the other side lay a dark, rocky tunnel. She wriggled a few feet into it before taking a breath. The air tasted sweet and earthy, free of the landfill’s stench. Ten or fifteen feet in, she saw something. A rock lit by a beam of light. She had to turn onto her back, scratching herself all over in the process, to glimpse the light’s source: a crack of blue sky. She just stared up at it until a slender hand reached down to help her. Eva’s—but so much stronger than Camille expected. After fighting for every inch, Camille seemed to spring from the earth in one swift motion. She emerged dizzy and half-blind. “Look,” Eva said, nearly whispering.

 As Camille’s eyes adjusted, she saw waves of treetops rolling below them. They’d emerged on the bare shoulder of a mountain, all rocks and gravel. She turned to find the peak within reach. Crowned with trees, it invited them up. They took turns guessing where the portal had taken them as they made their ascent. Eva suggested Canada. 

“Canada’s cold,” Camille said. Eva made the case for China as Camille helped her over the last rock, onto the muscular root of a pine tree. “Portals don’t go that far,” Camille said. “And it’d be dark if we were in China.”

If they could keep their discovery a secret, Camille explained, they could sell it to somebody. They laughed at their good fortune. They could pay off everything, do whatever they wanted. Just like Mom said: their big hit.

*

Camille texts Eva: Are you going to be around this weekend? The phone buzzes two hours later, by which time Camille’s already on her way, filling her tank at a rest station. This weekend’s going to be touch and go, Eva says.

What’s tonight like for you? Camille replies.

No response.

It’s a long crawl up I-95. By the time Camille turns onto the wooded backroad where Eva lives, her neck and shoulders are a web of knots. She sighs in relief at the sight of her sister’s car. In the bungalow Eva’s been renting for years, lights glow in every room. Her phone goes straight to voicemail. Camille marches up to the door and knocks.

*

After that first trip through the washer, Eva and Camille swore each other to secrecy. It felt like a wad of cash in Camille’s pocket, their secret, soothing her when she’d otherwise panic—when a supervisor gave her a sketchy look, or when the Camry started rattling. Eva too seemed to tread more easily, goofing around the house the way she used to. Sometimes Camille caught Mom just staring at them, looking relieved. Whenever they grinned, she beamed.

But the first round of prospectors didn’t inspire confidence. No one was willing to pay her a finder’s fee upfront, or even listen to her for very long. One asked for pictures, which Camille feared they’d use to find the portal themselves. Another demanded to know where exactly it led. You ought to at least know that, he said, and Camille found this reasonable enough, so one morning she and Eva snuck into the white waste, crawled through the washing machine, and trekked down the pebbly slopes in search of civilization. At many points, they appeared to descend at a perfect 45 degrees, which seemed odd. The other mountains around them seemed much bumpier. More natural. An hour later they reached a road, which they walked until they found a mailbox with bills inside: Larson, West Virginia. Their discovery felt much realer for it. They climbed back up the mountain elated—their portal bypassed 400 hundred miles, five state lines.

It took another year of rejections for the secret to lose its luster. Larson, they’d learn, was an early victim of mountain-top removal mining—the green crown atop their mountain wasn’t a peak, but a foot of the mountain that used to be. A pinch of green left for appearance’s sake. With its coal extracted, and its streams still contaminated, few lived in Larson anymore. No one needed a shortcut from Jersey to Larson, one prospector assured her, offering a hundred dollars for it.

Still, Mom refused to let the good mood go. One morning Camille caught her staring at the yard, mentally dividing it into plots. With her new waking hours, she decided to tame it. Lotto tickets stopped appearing in the trash. Eventually things felt safe enough for Camille and Eva to leave the waste center for normal, lower-paying jobs at the mall.

Thinking back on that initial excitement still makes Camille cringe. But Eva practically moved to Larson. Always wandering, drawing, vegging on some forgotten pile of rubble. New scratches on her arms before the last batch could heal. Something terrible would come of it, Camille was sure. Eva would get trapped in the tunnel. She’d run into some old man with a shotgun. She’d share a joint with some trailer kid who’d introduce her to meth. Camille begged her to leave it alone, threatened to report it to the state.

“It belongs to us,” Eva said. “I’ll never forgive you if you report it.” 

By the time Camille received a scholarship offer from Georgetown, Mom was promoted to bulldozing. She pickled vegetables on the side. One day she caught Linda’s eye at a farmer’s market, and once it became clear how nice Linda was, what stability she brought, Mom ceased being a source of constant worry. The girls really could do whatever they wanted, just as they were promised. As Camille packed her car to leave for good, she begged Eva to go easy on the portal. It was all she could do. 

But Eva never moved further than a few miles from home. She worked shitty jobs, brought no one to the holidays. Every year she seemed to wither a little more. Every Christmas, birthday, baby shower: she never seemed at ease. It disturbs Camille more each year. Whatever holds her sister back, Camille never doubted that it lay beyond the portal. What the hell is she still doing out there? Camille has no idea. But she’d seen the look in her eye that day, when she pulled Camille out of the earth. Like the mountains already possessed her. 

*

Ten or twenty knocks at Eva’s door go unanswered. Camille folds her arms. Wandering around the lawn, she turns Linda’s testimony over in her head: The way you see homeless people, sometimes, just storming around in public. 

Camille returns to the door and bangs on it, shouts Eva’s name. Her fist is throbbing when it finally opens. “Eva’s not here,” someone says. A woman Camille doesn’t recognize. 

 “I’m sorry, but I’m her sister. I know she’s in there. Her car’s right there.”

The stranger hesitates. “Your mom picked her up. They went to Walmart.” 

Camille laughs. She remembers Eva calling Walmart her fool-proof alibi. Because it’s impossible to find anyone at Walmart. She thrusts her arm through the door before the stranger can shut her out. She marches past her, straight into Eva’s room. Empty. She strides back to the living room. Balled-up on the couch: Eva’s apron from ACME. Perched on the shelves: those insects she welds out of cutlery. The carpet is covered in shoeprints, cigarette burns, puddle-shaped stains—accidents from those geriatric cats of hers, probably. Eva won’t get a penny back on her deposit. “Where are the cats?” 

The stranger shrugs. “I didn’t know she had any. I’m just visiting for the weekend.” Whatever Eva’s up to, Camille thinks, this person is in on it. She’s going to deflect everything. “I work with her at ACME,” she adds, sounding patient. 

Time for diplomacy, it would seem.

Camille apologizes, introduces herself. The stranger says her name is Fatimah. She seems about Camille’s age. Her round face grows tense as Camille lingers on it—she looks a little bit like Camille’s first boss at New York Life, a Lebanese woman who always seemed pained to answer any of Camille’s questions. Like she knew you were doomed to writhe in uncertainty, no matter how much of the job she explained to you. Fatimah, too, must be waiting for Camille to succumb to doubt, to shrivel up and quit. “How is working with Eva?”

“She’s very nice,” Fatimah says. “She offered me her couch while my house is treated for termites.” Fatimah speaks evenly, without hesitation. Camille wonders about her accent. She can’t place it. “Are you from the area?” she asks. It occurs to her how weaselly this sounds. The resulting silence from Fatimah makes her face burn. “I’m sorry.”

“I live in Millville,” Fatimah says, declining to offer where she may have lived before that.

Probably not West Virginia. 

“You didn’t bring much with you,” Camille notices.

“I had to get out,” Fatimah says. “The termites took over quickly.” Camille imagines bugs chewing tunnels all around her, holes in every surface. She can see the stress of the ordeal in the creases around Fatimah’s eyes.

She supposes Eva and Mom could be at Walmart, running some errand. It’s not impossible. “I’m sorry I barged in like that.”

“It’s fine,” Fatimah says. Camille stammers out more apologies, says she’ll get out of her hair. Fatimah returns to a giant purple scarf she’s knitting. But halfway to the door, Camille thinks to call Mom—Mom could verify everything. “I’m just going to see how much longer they’ll be,” she says, pulling out her phone. But Mom’s phone goes straight to voicemail. “I’m in town…” Camille begins. She pauses for a moment. “…I’ll see you soon.” 

There’s something about the way Fatimah knits. An intensity that makes Camille feel like a great annoyance to her. It’s insulting. “Do you have any younger siblings?” Camille asks.

“Yes,” Fatimah says.

“Have you ever just had an awful feeling about them? Like you knew they were making some horrible choice, you just didn’t know which?”

“If I found a stranger in one of my little brothers’ houses, I would be suspicious of them too.” 

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Camille says, but she’s sure Fatimah has decided it best to just indulge her. She can’t stand it. “Do you think Eva’s doing alright?”

Fatimah seems to mull it over. “It’s hard to say.” She doesn’t sound dismissive, exactly. But she leaves it at that. 

Camille fights back a sigh. “Sometimes I just feel like I could lose her any day.” 

“I’ll tell her to call you.” Fatimah looks her in the eye. “I promise.”

On the ride to Mom’s, Camille tries to imagine what Eva’s been doing in Larson. What happened to her cats. At a red light, Camille’s phone rings. Her husband, she’s sure. She can call him when she’s settled, she decides—but then she glances down and sees Linda’s name on the screen. Her posture straightens as she picks it up. “I’m actually on my way over now.”

“I’m sorry I got you so worried about your sister.” It’s been nagging her all day, Camille can tell. “I feel like I might’ve opened some old wounds.” 

She’s not wrong. Though Camille is aware that, in all probability, Eva will be alive tomorrow, it does nothing to calm her nerves. Before she knows it, she’s explaining this to Linda. “I just interrogated this poor coworker of hers.”

“Oh, honey. You’re protective. And you two went through so much together.” This is true—Camille is protective. “I’m almost there,” she says. 

“I’ll be glad to have the company.” Linda says. “Your Mom was determined to be early for the convention tomorrow. She already checked into our hotel. I’d be there with her if I didn’t have to teach a class in the morning.”

“I’m sorry?” Camille’s hands tighten around the wheel. “What’s tomorrow?”

“The Big Dill! You know, the convention we do in Princeton?” 

Camille lays her foot on the brake. As Linda ticks off the vegetables they pickled for this year’s showcase, Camille pulls over and steps out. She waits for Linda to stop talking, paces laps around the car until she can’t take it anymore. “Mom’s at the Big Dill?” she interrupts. “Like right now?”

“She is! Is everything okay?” 

“I’ve got to call you back,” Camille says, kicking over someone’s recycling. Had she really believed, even for a second, that Mom and Eva were at Walmart? 

She should go back and demand the truth from Fatimah.

But had Fatimah even claimed to see them leave? Eva could’ve just lied to her, like she lies to everyone else. Camille shakes with anger. She’s too worked-up for some heart-to-heart with Linda now. All she can think about is the white waste. The portal. The old bird patrol paths are still seared into her brain.

In the waste center parking lot, Camille finds Eva’s bike chained to the usual tree. She removes the flashlight from her trunk, strides into the dark. She walks the long way around the spotlights cast by the night crew, along the routes she and Eva perfected as kids. She finds the washing machines right where she left them, crouches down in front of one marked with a magnet. Woodstock from Peanuts—Eva stuck it there so long ago, any hint of yellow had long faded to white. It'll just be a matter of time before the door swings open, she’s sure.

It’s been almost two decades since Camille last squirmed through the portal herself. Still, when she gets impatient and opens the door, she immediately recognizes the earthy smell on the other side. Her eyes well up despite herself. 

Memories of the backyard in summer come bubbling to the surface. Cartwheels and Colorforms, laughing together at Dad’s latest haul of broken machines.

It belongs to us, Eva insisted—that means Camille as much as her.

She crawls into the washer. Better to catch Eva on the other side, where there’ll be no night crew to catch them.

Wriggling through the Earth, her head pounds. How does Eva still do this? She thinks of all the lives that seeped through these stupid holes. She sees Dad hunched over his workstation, seethes between sobs. She claws at the rocks in front of her. But where the tunnel’s exit should be, there are only more rocks. She scours everything with her flashlight. There’s no way forward. It doesn’t make any sense. She tries to retreat, but she’s too big to maneuver backwards now. She’s stuck. 

It's all Eva’s fault.

It takes long, frantic minutes to find a rock that wriggles even slightly. It’s only about the size of her fist. She wraps her hand around it and wrenches until she’s found an angle at which it’s willing to turn. With a forceful pull it comes loose, but something strange comes with it: a whole sheet of rocks that are connected somehow, as if glued to the same towel. One clocks her in the forehead as she pulls the sheet down, but she hardly feels it—her eyes fix onto the night sky the rocks concealed, much starrier than the sky she left behind. For a while she just stares at it, shaking. Gulping the fresh air. She climbs out in a daze.

Her flashlight doesn’t reveal anything in the rubble around her. After a few cursory sweeps, she turns it off and makes for the trees. She clambers over the first root, settles on top of it. For a moment she thinks she hears rumbling, like back at the landfill. But it doesn’t take long to clear her head, savor the breeze. It’s a beautiful spot, she can give Eva that much. She need only wait for the flashlight that’ll give her sister away. It could be faint from this distance, so she concentrates—her eyes are wide open when, out of nowhere, an army of headlights snap on all at once, and somewhere a man shouts into a megaphone. From here it’s a crackling babble, but she distinctly hears the words “WITH YOUR HANDS UP.”

The headlights seem to be pointed at the patch of rubble from which she emerged, as opposed to her current spot, but she finds little comfort in the distance between herself and the uniformed men who step out of the shadows to surround the tunnel’s opening. The engines keep revving as the men investigate it. She’s still counting all the headlights when they fan out in different directions, including hers. Don’t scramble, she thinks. Raises your hands.

“I knew it!” someone spits in her ear, hoisting Camille up from behind—Camille recognizes her voice immediately, but still thrashes in her arms. They’re well into the woods before she accepts what’s happening—that they’re running now. That there’s no time to explain, they’re just running. Her and Eva.

When they come out the other side of the woods, a steep slope lay at their feet. Out of breath, Camille looks down to find ATVs combing the rubble below. “They’ll get out and climb up here any second,” Eva says, doing something on her phone. When she insists there’s nowhere to hide, that the woods are a trap, Camille almost feels grateful that one of them knows what’s going on. 

“What the fuck is happening?”

Eva ignores her. “Turn off your phone,” she says. “We have to climb down.”

Camille’s hands shake so hard, she nearly drops the phone as she turns it off. She tries to mimic Eva’s movements down the slope, how Eva twists her body around the bends. But Camille’s calves start to shake. The muscles are unpracticed. Eva has to guide her closely along a near-vertical section, atop ridges that crumble under her feet. The ATVs grow louder, brighter—they’re out of time, Camille thinks. “We have to turn back,” she says. But Eva pushes her ahead, right up to a dead end. A nearly flat slab of rock. As Camille turns around to protest, Eva shoves her into it.

Camille lands hard in a bed of sand, engulfed in white-hot light. The headlights, she thinks. Only as Eva’s face comes into focus—as weary and crow-footed as Linda promised—does she register the blue sky roaring behind it. She sits up to find walls of sand rippling high in every direction. The only object to distinguish anything for miles is a frisbee-shaped rock at their feet—Eva pulls out a switchblade, carves an X into it.

As Camille gets up for a better view, Eva grabs her by the calf. “Step in the wrong direction and you’re back in Larson.” 

It’s almost high noon—they’re on the wrong side of the planet. 

“Remember making fun of me?” Eva says. “For thinking we found a portal to China?” Camille tries to follow, but now it feels like the desert is losing its grip on her. Like it could surrender her to the sky. “It’s called the Taklamakan desert,” Eva adds. “You’ve probably never heard of it. It’s like twice the size of Texas.” She pulls her hair into a ponytail. 

“What country are we…” Camille lowers herself back to the ground, arms out like a lunar lander. Eva already said it.

“We’re going to have to take another portal back to Larson.”

“I don’t—how many fucking portals are there?”

“Here and Larson are lousy with portals. They call them clusters.” She’s describing the winding tendrils that reach through the planet when Camille cuts her off: “What are those cops doing back there?”

“That was ICE,” Eva says. “You don’t have any water, do you?” 

Camille shakes her head. When Eva tells her they have to get going, and that it’ll be a seven-hour walk, the Taklamakan widens around them. Camille’s throat chafes. “And you don’t have any water?” she asks.

“This wasn’t supposed to happen.”

The last thing Camille consumed was a bag of Pop-Corner chips that she washed down with coffee on I-95. She’s heard of people dehydrating under better conditions than these. “I won’t make it.” 

“We can’t go back.” 

Maybe if Eva’s face betrayed something other than her own anger—but no, Camille can’t stand it: “How was I supposed to know what you were—”

“—I told you this weekend would be touch and go.” As Camille tries to respond, Eva talks over her: “You have no idea what you’ve done. Your stupid fucking flashlight.”

Camille stops trying to get a word in. She just stares at Eva.

“It’s fine,” Eva huffs, sounding anything but. “You can go back. You’ll probably sit in jail for a while, but they have nothing on you. And you don’t know anything, really. But whatever you do, I have to start walking.”

Eva pulls out a compass. She seems to study her own shadow like a sundial. Camille barely knows this person. And yet, if she dies out there, it’ll rip a hole in Camille. It’s not fair.

“I’m serious,” Eva says. “I have to start right now.”

How Camille used to dream of the day when Eva finally settled down. She envisioned some patchy-bearded dude for her, tattooed but gentle; nieces and nephews to bring on vacation; a sister anchored, at last, to the same reality as Camille. “Fine,” she says, heart revving in her chest. “Let’s go.”

As they zigzag through the dunes, Eva says she just came from Kashmir, one of the Taklamakan’s local exits. She says she works for a group that serves refugees, helps them fake paperwork and land jobs. She ticks off a list of persecuted ethnic groups who Camille has never heard of. 

Fatimah—she must be one of these people, Camille realizes. According to Eva, they’ve spread themselves as thin as possible across the States, managing to stay under the radar for years. They were only exposed last fall when someone arrested for petty crimes caved under interrogation. “Now ICE is sniffing all over Appalachia for the tips of our cluster, and China’s combing the desert for theirs. Be on the lookout for birds—could be drones.”

Camille can’t stand Eva’s new worldliness. She grinds her teeth. She steps into a voracious patch of sand, curses as she sinks down to her knee. “You need to get out of this,” she groans. “You’re obviously in over your head.”

“People are still stranded at the waypoints,” Eva says, pulling her out. “Someone has to get them out.”

“Why you? You’re going to end up in prison for decades. Mom’s going to lose her fucking mind.”

“Mom will be fine."

Camille dry heaves through another three hours of marching. They’re silent for most of it, walking until Camille can’t anymore. Intending to descend gradually, she stumbles into the sand. Eva crouches over her, holds her hand to Camille’s forehead. “Shit.”

The sky pulses with heat. It twists and snaps until Camille sees her family in it, splashing around. Jousting with pool noodles. For a second, in the distance, she thinks she sees a burning tree. 

Eva sits down beside her. They share a tearful glance. Then Camille starts laughing. She’s delirious, she thinks: if she had the presence of mind, she’d be making Eva feel as horrible as possible for this.

“You have to get up,” Eva says. “When the sun sets, we’ll freeze.”

“Five minutes,” Camille mutters, mouth unbearably dry. She needs to lie here and think about her kids while she can still think. They’re younger than she was when Dad died—better that way, she decides. Better they remember as little as possible. 

*

Something like a tongue skates across Camille’s face. A scavenger, she thinks. One moment she feels it moistening her chin. The next, her ear. Opening her eyes, she realizes how dark it’s gotten. She tries to raise her head, but something pushes her back down. A familiar-smelling hand. “Ready for more water?”

The woman is a shadow, but Camille knows the outline. The poof of her bangs. That uninhibited slouch. “What happened?” Camille squeaks—talking seems to rip the back of her throat open. “We pitched tents for the night,” Mom says. She raises a canteen to Camille’s lips. “We won’t head out until morning.” As Camille drinks, Mom says more, but none of it clicks. When she takes the canteen away, the world slips back out of reach.

Camille wakes up to find the sky regaining its complexion. She struggles out of her sleeping bag, spots Mom sitting up beside her.

“How’d you find us?” 

Mom points at a landmark, a yellow tree in the distance. It’s the first living thing Camille’s seen in the desert. “I drove home and grabbed the bug-out bags as soon as Eva called.” 

“She’s made you meet her here before?”

Mom hands her a pack of Belvita cookies. “I know how you feel about this,” she says. “But you ought to be proud of her.”

Not even a little, Camille thinks. The anger stokes her appetite. Tearing into the cookies, she sees a future full of court hearings and emptied savings. “ICE must be going through the waste center with a fine-tooth comb,” she says, spitting crumbs. “They’re going follow the trail to Eva—are you ready for that? This is going to be a circus. This is going to be hell…” Mom keeps her eyes on the desert, doesn’t respond until Camille’s run out of miserable things to say. 

“You seem to have your energy back. Maybe you should go talk to her.”

Camille studies Mom’s face. She expects her to look the way she did twenty years ago: eyes glazed with fatigue, lips on the verge of quivering.

But Mom looks resolute. Wrapped in an enormous scarf like the one Fatimah was knitting, one could mistake her for someone in her element.

Camille steps into a sea of shadows. The sun only skims the highest dunes. Every inch of her is sore, and just the outline of Eva’s tent makes her want to turn back. She’ll attempt stretches first, she decides. But the first stretch makes her yelp in pain, and a moment of paranoia follows—she feels someone watching her. Glancing around, she spots Fatimah scant feet away and jumps.

“Don’t mind me,” Fatimah says. 

Camille tries not to snap at her—this woman never forced Eva to do a thing. But god, what misery she and her crowd have brought. Camille has to say something. “Are you part of the group running this?”

“I am.”

“Eva says it’s all unraveling now—what’s your plan?”

A gust of wind careens into them. Fatimah steps closer. “There’s a portal Eva hasn’t told you about,” she says. “It has to stay secret, even from our families. It’s a one-way trip.” Before Camille can process this, Fatimah tells her how her work started. How she saw a bird disappear in mid-air as a child, on the outskirts of her hometown. She sounds unrehearsed, stopping periodically to gather her thoughts. “For years I kept going back to that spot. It was much higher than I realized—I needed a ladder to finally reach it.” 

As the government set up prison camps in the hills, and her neighbors disappeared in the night, Fatimah led others through the portal, which brought them far away, but not far enough. She describes meeting people who found other parts of the cluster. Still, none of the local exits ever brought them to permanent safety. Fatimah seems to wait for Camille to put the pieces together. After a moment, she adds, “So when I found this young woman in Western dress covered in scratches, wandering the desert, I knew everything was about to change.”

Somehow it hadn’t occurred to Camille that Eva might’ve crossed first—that her world might’ve seeped in Fatimah’s, and not the other way around. Something in her rejects this. But then she imagines her sister poking around Larson, kicking rocks down the mountain—Eva would, in her meandering way, be the first synapse across hemispheres. 

In the distance, the sun grazes the tree’s ball of yellow leaves. A poplar, Fatimah calls it. Camille can’t seem to look away. “That one-way trip,” she says. “Eva’s going with you, isn’t she?”

“You need to talk to her,” Fatimah says. The tent shimmers behind her, unzipped. 

Eva’s folding a blanket as Camille enters. Just something about the precision with which she rolls it into a vacuum bag feels unbearably self-important. “Where are you going?” Camille asks.

“I can’t tell you.”

Camille scowls.

“It’s not just us,” Eva says. “A lot of good people are already out there. They need somewhere safe to raise their kids.”

“All I want to know is which part of the fucking planet to add to my auto-alerts.”

“People will be watching you and Mom. Just typing it into something could put everyone in danger.”

Camille can’t stand another second of Eva’s new worldliness. “And you’re not coming back?”

Eva says nothing.

Camille storms out of the tent. Her little sister feels like a malignant growth, like a mole she should’ve gotten checked out years ago. She’s ready to be done with her. To never speak of her again—not until a time, should it ever come, when the memories of Eva are flat and harmless.

But the memories aren’t even minted yet. The desert still sprawls around them.

Soon, against gusts of sand, Eva and Fatimah are packing up their tent. Eva rolls it into its yet another bag. She appears competent, Camille can admit. She jumps from tent-packing to gear-checking without missing a beat, eyes possessed by the task at hand.

Camille tries to imagine Eva’s life-in-hiding—a malaria-ridden jungle, a dark web of caves. When Mom appears from behind Camille to rub aloe on her arms, she shivers. “Tell me you know where they’re going,” she says.

Mom clutches both her hands. “Knowing wouldn’t give us any more control.”

A ghost town buried in snow, another scorching desert—possibilities keep flashing through her head.

Herself, she’d take prison. Prison in a fucking heartbeat, Camille thinks. The thought makes her laugh. How different they are. Eva looks over in time to catch Camille grinning, and Camille wishes she hadn’t. Her only weapon is her disapproval.

But Eva looks so relieved by the shred of levity. And at the sight of Eva grinning back at her, she’s surprised to feel her own burden lighten. It only lasts a second. But for a second, her sister is just a person she’s fond of, bathed in sunlight.