A Hole in the World

                "Thirteen girls filled the dance studio.  That’s what I remember learning as a little girl.  Everyone piled inside, and we stood in a line and counted off.
                "One! Two! Three!  Until we got to thirteen.  It was like that every year.  Stick and bone girls would pull their tights over scabby knees and rustle in tutus until Sarah, the dance instructor, clapped her hands to call us to order.  Eventually the numbers thinned, first to ten girls, then to five.  Then it was just me, my leotard a pale ghost of memory in the studio, twirling and hurling myself into positions my little girl self couldn’t believe I would ever accomplish.
                "That’s what I miss.  I miss the smell of animal crackers and hairspray as I joined twelve of my friends dance as Indian princesses, Thumbelina, the Frog Prince.  I never danced the Nutcracker.  Even when I left Sarah’s for the Academy, I refused.  It flaunted girlhood at teenagers who forgot what it felt like to be a child, holding a doll, and it becoming the man she wanted him to be."
                Marney looks at me from the bunk, her eye blinking back a tear that I don’t understand.  She wipes at it quickly.
                  "It was a lie I didn’t want to tell for anyone.  Not even to myself."
                These are the first words Marney’s spoken since waking this morning.  First she only stared at me, her eye a swamp-mud brown that seemed angry and sad.  Now she lays on the inch-thick mattress on her side, her bad eye covered by tangled black hair.  Her hands are dirty and rough.  I want to ask how she got here, but I just listen.
              "The point of this is that I want to tell you about how I got here.  About life before.  And after.  Everyone tells their story, but I never did.  Collin always knew me before, and I felt whole in the knowledge that he was always going to remember me.  But now… now I know that I want to tell someone everything.  I want to tell you about my life, and I want you to understand that it’s not just because I’m going to die.  It’s not because they beat me and shoved me in here with you.  It’s because my life needs to mean something.  Do you understand?"
              I nod.  I don’t trust myself to speak.  Watching her mouth move is painful.  It’s cut and bleeding.  Isn’t she thirsty?  If I say a word, it will be to beg her to take water.  To fill her mouth with food and cushion her body with nourishment.
                  But I nod.  I sit forward and wait.  Shuffling her body, she begins anew.
"I’m going to call you Charles.  Do you know why?  I knew a man named Charles, once.  He was special to me."
                  I wait.  I want to hear more about Charles.  She doesn’t even ask my name.  Knowing me isn’t important, now.
                    "Charles, did you know that the quakes devastated the coasts two months after they hit the Midwest?  They did.  While the people in Illinois, Missouri, Indiana waited for help, New York, California, Texas: they did nothing.  Sure, aide workers came.  Choirs sang ‘God Bless America’ while they filmed children being led from crumbling buildings.  But did anyone truly help?  Did anyone pull from the rubble the screaming mothers who only wanted to hold their sons one more time?  Did they help the starving get food and keep the women from being raped and ensure that everyone got out?
                "Of course not. 
                "Do you remember the global disasters leading up to America’s big fall?  The quakes and tsunamis and bombing in Mexico?  How the world seemed to fall apart?  Reality tv would explain the importance of pledging as much as possible to its viewers, then resume the airing of Wendy the Wiley falling down the stairs in a drunken stupor.
                  "And people seemed to care for an appropriate amount of time.  And then a controversy would grab our attention.  And then another disaster hit, and another, each more desperate and scary than the previous.  The people cared, of course they did.  But how much can a seventeen year old dancer, or a twenty-one year old drummer, or a fifty-two year old doctor give before they’re allowed to remember themselves?
                  "These are the questions I asked myself after I discovered how long the coasts waited.  6 weeks.  6 weeks, Charles.  Do you know how many people can die in that time?
                    "I’m sorry.  I’m angry.  Am I bothering you?"
                    She’s been staring at the ceiling this entire time.  Her bad eye is showing itself to me.  I can’t see anything but the ravaged, bloody hole that marks where her eye used to be.  This is how McConnell marked her, then.  I’m not surprised.  I met many of his enemies, over the years.
                      But to answer her question: No, I say.  You’re not bothering me.  Please.  Continue.
                    She shrugs, and I see how tired she must be.  How much of a struggle it is to form words.  I get her a glass of water, place it above her mouth and she seems to realize what’s in front of her.  Strength fills her and she tugs it and slovenly gobbles it down.  Gasping, she turns her eye on me again.  It seems less foggy, easier to make me out.  Can she see my face?  Does she still see Charles there?
                    "I didn’t realize how thirsty I was.  Thank you, Charles.
                    "Let me tell you about Bradey.
                    "When I was a little girl, Bradey was my best friend.  Not because we enjoyed one another’s company, but because I craved to be like him.  Do you know why?  Because of my mother. 
                    "It would be midnight, I a child.  I would awaken to her excited laughter as she pulled me from my bed.  We would dance and laugh as we jumped and sang, and Bradey would wake up and peek from the doorway.  He knew never to disturb us during these times. 
                  "My mother would smile and paint my fingernails in the afternoon, and cook me eggs and barbecue at any time of the day.  Sometimes she would spray perfume on my neck, and let me perform ballet in the living room as if it were a real recital.  With feathers around her neck and her best dress on, she would announce the most majestic of all: Marney Morrison!
                  "That’s not why Bradey was my best friend.  Not all of it.
                  "Because at other times my mother wouldn’t wake me up.  She wouldn’t smile and let me tell her secrets.  Laying in bed in the dark chamber that was her bedroom, she would let Bradey sit on the edge of the bed, like a fish perched on a dry dock, and gather from her her own secrets like water.
                    "She would cry and let him hug her; a tiny boy that couldn’t tell time was giving her the love she craved.  I heard the secrets.  I would wait in my leotard, dying for her to become my mother instead of his, so I could dance for her, and I could hear her secrets.
                'Only you understand.
                  'Your father thinks I’m crazy.
                  'There’s a hollowness in me.'
                "These are words I heard many times after the quakes.  But at that time they were hers.  For years people would regretfully spit out the truth of their lives, and I would gather them like Bradey gathered her secrets.  And he would let her be his sad mother, and let her be my happy one, because he knew that that was the only way it could be.
                  "That’s why he was my best friend.  He gave my mother to me. 
                  "Do you understand, Charles?"
                    I nod.  She gives a half smile, and her eyelids close over mud and blood.  She sleeps.
---
                Around midnight she awakens.  And I see her struggle against the thin shift I laid over her as she shivered.
                "Charles?"
                It’s me.  I’m here, I say, and she smiles as her eye is still closed.
                  The hole doesn’t move.  It’s just a recess where the shadows play tricks on me.  I see myself in that eye more than I saw myself in the one that can still see.
I love the night.  She’s breathing very calmly, as if still asleep somewhere.
                "I used to sit in my bedroom at night and hope for the birds to sing as if it were morning.  Of course they never did, but I would wait, anyway.  I knew if I just prayed enough they would sing for me.
                "I don’t pray anymore.  Do you, Charles?"
                  Not for a long time, I whisper, and she nods.
                  "Me, too.  I prayed a lot when it first happened.  Right after I got hurt and Collin helped me.  I had a fever.  Have I told you this story?"
                  No, I say, and I wait.  I can feel her waking now, stirring.  No birds are singing.  Does she pray for them now?
                  "At the Academy one of the instructors was injured.  Her name was Theodora.  What an impossible name.  She broke her ankle in some accident when she was just past her best days.  She didn’t recover in time, and she was thrust into the role I knew her as.  She only spoke of it once.  There were thirteen of us-thirteen?  Wait… no, that was another time.  There were… I can’t remember.  The girls and I blurred together, really, for her as well, I’m sure.  She watched us dance and giggle when we had a moment, and her bitterness bled through and she told us what happened.
                "You girls have it lucky, she told us.  You have a chance.  You can dance and be as I was, and keep a memory of dance alive the rest of your lives.  Don’t waste it. 
                "That was all.  We knew what had happened to her.  She never limped or waddled, and she could still twirl to show us what we should copy.  But her heart was gone.  She had nothing of what she once was.  I remember thinking how sad that was.  How utterly ridiculous that something as small as a broken ankle was that could take away her joy.
              "After the quakes, Collin and I were walking.  It was night.  So, so dark.  We were in town.  Have I told you about town?"
                Her eye opens and looks at me with a question in them.  No, you haven’t told me, I tell her, and she sighs.
                "It was just like any small town in Indiana.  A square with a courthouse made of tall white brick, with barber shops and law offices.  Sarah’s dance studio was there, where she still taught thirteen little girls how to plie' and ballon.  Across the street a tall bank made of golden glass reflected the sun like a perfect mirror, and I used to imagine that smart, rich people went there to put their briefcases on their desks and speak into the phone as if the world would end if they didn’t achieve that day’s quota.
                "After the quakes, it was all rubble.  The bank’s tall windows had mostly shattered, and as I walked I saw that the insides were just like any office.  And that no greatness could ever have presided inside, because what could possibly be great about a dirt ridden floor and walls that crumbled and fell as the wind blew against them?
This was a few weeks later, when Collin and I decided we should leave my house for town.  It was scary, the night we arrived.  We had walked miles and miles and thought surely some vestige of what life was like there would be there then.  But it wasn’t.
That was our first taste of how things would be in the years to come.  He put his arm around me as we walked past a building with scurrying noises and hushed whispers, and I felt protected.  Safe.  And then I felt a sharp pain in my head and someone was behind me, pulling me from his arm and throwing me to the ground.  I struggled and fought, and Collin somehow got me away from them.  I don’t know how many there were.  I heard angry shouts and strange mushy thuds, and Collin’s breath whooshed out of him like wind in a tunnel.  At the time I thought it was the wind in the bank: the ghostly voices of the bank’s phone conversations replaying to the dead town’s ears.
And I realized something was wrong.  Blood was on my head, and I couldn’t see.  It was everywhere, and he was worried.  I remember him whispering to me that it would be alright, but I couldn’t figure out how.  My leg wasn’t what it had been moments before, and I peered down and made out blood slowly dripping from a gash there.  One of the men had cut it.  A man that I had probably passed in the street as a girl had tried to take from me something only a nutcracker man could have, and because he didn’t get it, he ruined me.
              "My leg didn’t work after that.  After the fever set in, and then it healed, I limped.  I was like Theodora, but the evidence of my waste was there for anyone to see."
              Marney goes quiet, and I see her mouth turn down in a sad grimace.  I reach out to put my fingers on her shoulder, and she jumps only slightly.
            "Charles, could you just… I know you’re not the man I’m calling you.  So don’t touch me, alright?  Just because I’m telling you this doesn’t mean anything.  Alright?"
              These words cut me, but I move my hand away.  After so long alone here, the simple touch of someone’s skin that isn’t bruising mine makes me want to cry.  But I listen.  I don’t move to touch her again.
---
            "Can you describe this room for me?  It’s so dark.  In the light I can see, but at night, it’s all nothing."
              It IS dark, I tell her.  It’s a wooden room.  Small.  It used to be a cabin for campers.  Of all of the places not to be damaged, this place surprises me most of all.  There’s a door and a small window. 
              I don’t tell her that the window faces forward, where there’s a man outside who’s trying not to listen.  He knows they put Marney here so I would ruin her further, but so far he hasn’t ensured I do so.
              "What else?"
              There’s a small table and a tin bowl with water.  On the walls are messages from girls.  Trixie was here.  3rd team rules ’98.  Abbey and Len BFF.    Layers and layers of words that used to mean something.
                "Does it make you sad?"
I don’t speak.  I let her think her thoughts while I stare at the small marker print I’ve just noticed beneath my foot.  Marney Loves Collin.  The word loves is actually a small red heart, with an apostrophe and an S tacked onto the end.  I stare at it and then at her, and I see her smile.
                "I went to a camp.  Every summer for years I brought my sleeping bags and my bathing suit and I arm wrestled my friends and waited for the co-ed dance at the end of July.  That camp was important to me after the quakes, too.  Would you like to hear about it?"
            I have no choice.  She rushes to fill the silence.  The man outside repositions himself.  I thought for a moment he had turned, but his neck is all I see in the moonlight.
            "There were rules at camp.  Don’t swim at night.  Don’t sneak off to see the boys.  Rise and shine at the bell and be on time for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  Messiest cabin does KP.  That’s Kitchen Patrol, Charles.  I always volunteered.  I felt so special, eating first then playing the old piano in the Mess Hall while everyone else had to listen.
            "I was so bad at it.  I would play Chopsticks until a counselor would wrangle me into doing the dishes I had volunteered for.  Bradey and Collin would stand in line for their hot dogs or pizza and guffaw as I was thrust into my work.  Then when I returned they would be sitting at the piano bench, their heads bent in concentration as they fervently played a tune that never ended.
            "Collin was a cute boy.  And my brother’s best friend.  Of course I had a crush on him.  But girls at aged twelve have crushes, and boys at thirteen don’t see them.  He saw my ratty hair and my dull mud eyes.  My gawky elbows and knees cried for grass to stain them.  Nothing about me made him look at me.
              "At camp there were also daily activities.  Archery, swimming, canoeing.  I was the best shot at riflery.  Did you know that they let the eight year olds shoot guns?  That by the end of the summer of his first year there, when I was home desperate to join him because I was still too young, my brother earned first place in his age group?  I can tell you’re impressed, Charles.  Everyone was.
              "Bradey had that effect on people.  By the time I arrived two years later he was infallible, and I was his annoying sister that sang too loud at the campfire and never came out of the lake during buddy check.
              "I had a friend there.  Her name was Margi.  Margi was great at horseback riding and crafts, and I taught her my ballet moves every year until I stopped going at fifteen.
                "I had a dance camp to go to instead.  So for three months while I learned how to train my body, Margi got her first kiss from Bradey.  My feet turned hard and calloused, and hers grew tanned and pruned.
              "I always envied her for that summer.  The next summer Bradey and Collin stayed home, too.  They were too old for camp.  That’s what they said, anyway.  I went back, and Margi bemoaned my brother’s absence until she met another boy from the boy’s side of camp.  She went out to swim one night with him.  She never came back."
              I look around in the darkness, searching for evidence of Margi’s existence in this cabin.  I don’t see her name anywhere.  I feel a sadness for a girl I’ll never know.  I look at Marney, but her sadness has already left her by the time my eyes get to her face.
              "Camp closed after that.  It laid forgotten for years until I told McConnell about it.  He resurrected it for us all and it was almost like it was when I was a girl.  I learned to love KP for other reasons, then."
---
            "Is it daytime?  I hear birds now."
              It is turning brighter.  The man outside looks around and sniffs, and I wonder if he listens as closely to Marney’s words as I do.
                I’ve been sitting for far too long.  I stand and stretch, and Marney moves her eye to me.  Squinting, she searches my face and props herself up on an elbow.  Her clothes are covered in filth, torn and frayed.  I want to clean them.  I want to give her the plaid shirt I wear and make her shrug into it while I scrub the sad clothing she’s worn since she was tossed in here with me.
              I walk the perimeter of the room, hardly twenty feet in all, and she moves to sit up.  In this position, I can see more of her face.  It was once pretty, but now is scratched and marred as her clothes are.  She seems to wait for something, her head tilted to one side. 
              Then I hear it, a loud ringing bell that dings in the morning.  The man at the window clears his throat, and I hear people far away calling out to another. 
              "Charles?"  Uncertain, she pulls herself up with her arms.  Stumbling towards the window, she reaches out, and I grab her forearms.  Her ghastly face is strained, and I move her towards the chair I just sat on.
                Let’s clean you up, I say, and she seems to only hear the bell, still waking the members of this colony.  I wipe at her face and her arms, trying to be gentle.  Beneath the grime I see that bruises litter her face, her neck, her shoulders.  She is purple and black.  Marney is a bruised statue. 
              "Are we here?  Is this…?"
                I don’t speak.  I only clean her and let her realize where she is.
                "How could it.. it’s not…"
                Marney’s mouth opens and closes, as if she’s gasping for air.  But I hear her breath.  It’s ragged and angry, and she looks at me sharply and tenses against my touch.
              "Charles, I can do it.  I’m not a child."
                She takes the cloth from me, and I lay on the mattress.  Before I can say a word, I am asleep.
---
            "… seven days and nights in a sewer with nothing but beans and soggy cornbread, now that was something, Charles."
                I sit up quickly, and knock my head against the shallow roof that is the top bunk’s plywood bottom.  Marney looks at me from the chair, smiling slightly, her body sagging almost off of the rickety chair.  I move from the bed and stretch, watching her watch me. 
            I missed something.  I remember a dream about a sewer in the Spring, filled with shit and frogs, and her voice floating around me like gas.  Now I see she is tired and it is daytime, and the guard outside is taking off his hat to scratch sweaty hair.  Marney leans forward across the expanse between herself and the bed and lowers onto it, sighing into the fabric as if heaven has finally come to relax the demons from her muscles.
            I want her to repeat what she’s already said, but as I walk around the cabin, she continues from where she left off.
            "It’s difficult to believe that we stayed there that long.  But it was the safest we could get at the time.  The earth’s movement had left us an opening to crawl in and out of, and we stayed there a week.  Collin, me, and a thirty-something year old from Kansas.  She had traveled to Indiana to help with the victims, then had been stranded in an after-shock.  A ten-pointer.  That’s another reason why people didn’t come to our aid, I think.  It was too dangerous.
                "Would you like to know about her?  She was blonde, if I recall, with a strangely small nose.  Her eyes were really large, and green.  Not a pretty green you only see in movies, but a weird hazel that made you think they were brown at first.  She had a nervous habit of flicking her nails against one another to make a tick tick tick noise.  She had some pretty good weed with her for the first two days, but we’d smoked it all and then it was all I could notice.  Tick tick tick, over and over, until finally I screamed at her and that was the seventh day so we left in case anyone heard and came looking."
                I sit down and eat the roll and vegetables she left for me.  She seems better, but only just.  I can see her wounded face has begun to heal; congealed blood and scabs are at the corner, and her bruises are bright against her skin.  She’s even slicked her hair into a pony tail, so I can see her better.  In this light, with more energy, she seems more graceful.  I see the ballerina she must have been, before.
                "After that Collin and I left her.  I wish I could remember her name.  That’s how it is though, isn’t it, Charles?  After the quakes you didn’t want to invest in anyone.  Something could take them away from you – disease, the army, whatever – so instead you remembered them by what distinguished them from others.  Ticks, a strange walk, strong hands.  That’s what I remember about people now.
                "I guess I don’t want to know your real name for the same reason.  Why learn who you are now?  What will it matter, since I’m already dead?"
                We sit in silence.  It’s unfair that she’s telling me everything about herself, making me learn her every story, if I’m not allowed to do the same.  But listening is all I want to do now, anyway.  I’ve done all of the talking I want to do.
            "The army was the worst, wasn’t it?  A year in, all of the service loaded up to fight off the West, since they were hoarding and killing and dismantling anything the constitution brought to be.  They took everyone that could fight.  I was left because of my leg.  Collin because he hid.  Did you escape?"
                Marney’s looking at me, her face turned so I can only see the pretty side.  I shake my head, remembering.
            "I like to think you were one of the good ones.  I won’t ask which side you were on.  It hardly matters, now.  Don’t you agree?  Now there’s only the winners and the losers.  It’s only a matter of time before this world becomes what it will be.  Pity we won’t see what it looks like.
                "I miss what life was before.  I always tried not to think about it, but now it’s all I can manage to remember.  My house.  It was big, for the town we lived in.  Dad was a doctor at the hospital, and we lived ten minutes away.  What the sky looks like now, so black with millions of stars gleaming thousands of lightyears away: that was what it looked like there.  Just after dusk you could see the reds of the town taking the stars away, but if I looked up, I saw every single one of them.
                "I used to do that, just look up for a moment or two and look.  I didn’t think the thoughts everyone seems to.  I didn’t imagine what Earth must seem like to a star, or think that we’re so small.  I just thought, oh.  There are stars.  And then I would set my sights forward and keep walking.
                "Now that’s all you can see, when you lay down to sleep.  Stars.  Night.  I hate it.  Now all I want is the impossible black brightness that surrounds the world when lights and cars and people bring.  Even here, when everyone’s awake and the fires are lit, it doesn’t do anything to drown the loud stars from the sky.
                "Let me tell you about Collin.
                "Collin was there as soon as he could be.  Dad and I sat in the wreckage of our beautiful home for hours, shocked, and then two lights appeared far, far away.  And this horrible yearning in me hoped it was done.  That the world had ended and these lights were here to take us away to the only place that was still whole.  And as they got closer I recognized them.  Collins truck was rumbling, it always rumbled.  Every time he and Brady got into that truck I hoped I’d be invited inside its mysterious depths, and here it was to save us.
                "How he made it, I don’t know.  You saw the footage, if you weren’t there when they hit.  Holes as deep as the sea.  Unrecognizable roads and homes.  Yet somehow he had found a way to us, and he got out of his truck as slammed the door and ran to us.  To me.  And he kneeled in front of me, put his hands on either side of my face.  Collin looked so sad.  He was dirty, his black hair covered in dirt and dust.  His knuckles and nose were bloody. 
                "You’re alright, he whispered, and I nodded.  And Dad asked where Brady was.  And Collin looked straight at me, his eyes sad, and said I lost him.  I don’t know.
                "He said he was there one minute, and gone the next.
                "I felt it then, reality sinking in.  Brady was out there somewhere, and Collin was there, and the world was gone and not coming back to save me from itself.
                "Collin was safety for me after that.  Dad got sick, and because of what Collin reported on town he didn’t want to go straight to the hospital.  I always read that doctors ran straight to the hospitals to help in times of crisis.  But he knew.  He knew there was no hospital, anymore.  That the people that sought help wouldn’t get it.  That anyone we met would only hurt us and take what meager supplies we had.
                "The diochlisinide, I learned later, is what killed thousands of the victims.  It was poison.  Invisible gas rose from the ground and suffocated people.  It bloated their bodies in an hour, until they were yellow life boats on dry ground, floating in their own piss and shit. 
                "Dad always slept outside to see the stars.  He watched them and smiled at how beautiful the night was now, and that’s where we found him.  Outside.  I couldn’t recognize the man who had held me when my mother was sad.  Who sang the peanut song with Brady on rainy days.  Who always ate a full bag of popcorn then asked if I wanted the unpopped kernels to chew.  He was just a body.  A corpse, Charles.  My father was reduced to a morgue decoration while Collin and I ate the last of the popcorn and whispered about where Brady could be.
                "That’s when we left for town.  When I couldn’t bear the thought of sleeping over the diochlisinide that had taken him from me any longer."
                Marney’s quiet for a long time.  I sit and wait.  I know there’s more to come.
            "Collin was sad, too, of course.  He lived in town, and had stopped home to check on everyone there.  He had four brothers.  Three lived at home, one was in Arizona.  Everyone there was dead.  Lonny was crushed by a toilet; Rex was buried under mountains of bedroom walls with posters of movies torn around him.  Collin said his dad and other brother, Frank, were in the basement.  He got to talk to his dad for about five minutes, but an aftershock hit and they were gone.
                "Then he came for me.  I know it sounds ridiculous, but I felt so special because of that.  Of everyone in our town to come save, to check on, Collin chose me.  He stayed with us until the food ran out, until my dad was nothing but a rancid pillow on the earth.  He stayed with me the entire time.
                "It wasn’t always that way. 
                "When I was fifteen and at camp, holding Margi’s head while she sobbed over the absence of my brother, he wasn’t thinking of me.  He was losing his virginity to Destiny Alexander, who after the quakes joined the army and I heard died in a battle in Idaho.  For an entire summer they were together, and then when I got back I had to hear about how much he loved her.  How her blonde hair blew in the wind and that he’d never met anyone so graceful.  Do you know how much that broke my heart?  That a girl that stubbed her toe at every turn was more graceful than me?  A ballerina, for Christ’s sake.
              "Then I turned sixteen, and then everything turned to shit.
              "You see, Charles, life wasn’t always bad.  I used to sit at home and watch cartoons, slurping chocolate milk and eating fruit roll ups.  I used to experiment with makeup and talk to Margi on the phone about plans.  I was going to join a company and dance anything but the nutcracker.  She was going to marry Bradey and have children that would call me Aunt Marney and make me love them even more than dance or Collin.  Margi brought out the joy in me, Charles.  So did life before.  Just because my mother was crazy and then dead didn’t mean I was.
              "But then Margi died in the water, swimming with a boy from the other side of camp.  And Collin was in love with a girl that liked candy and sports.  And Bradey was older and more worldly in my eyes.  And my dad was still a shell of himself ever since…  Well, everyone had their own lives.  And I didn’t have mine.  Except to bend my body to music as my feet took me away.
              "There was a movie, once, about this dance troupe.  One girl didn’t have the heart to dance, and when a fellow dancer fell and sprained his knee, she said she wished it had been her so she didn’t have to do it anymore.  Isn’t it funny?  She didn’t want to dance, and was uninjured, and it was all I had.  Until I got here I had one of my old ballet shoes.  I kept it through the years.  It was a soft pink when I first got it, but after the quakes it turned a rusty brown color.  I had the pair, but after I was injured the other shoe disappeared."
              For a reason she doesn’t explain, Marney smiles slightly at this.  I would have thought it would upset her, losing the other shoe. 
              "I guess now I should tell you exactly what happened to Bradey.  He and Collin were on their way to a concert.  Collin told me they had just reached the bridge when the quake happened.  Another friend was driving.  When the ground started to tremble, they all waited, quiet.  Then it shook and they tried to reverse but the car stalled.  So they ran.  Collin said the last time he saw my brother that night, Bradey was looking over his shoulder, his expression unreadable.  That was the one thing I hated about Collin, that he got to see Bradey’s last face when I didn’t.