Bea looked for the pond where people had gone, but she could see no evidence of it. Then, she saw two small shapes low in the sky and getting lower and then landing somewhere not too far in the distance. They flapped and reared and dropped their legs before they dropped from her sight, and she led Agnes toward where they’d landed, hoping to find the water.

They walked awhile before they heard the honk of a goose. And then they were upon it: a pond at the bottom of a shallow escarpment. It wasn’t the pond they’d walked by. That one had merely been a bloated spring ringed with some reeds and milkweed. They never would have seen this pond; it was below the horizon. It was small, almost a perfect circle, murky and browned by mineral and decay, but there were two geese and two ducks and some grebes noodling on the surface. Bea could see the animal trails heading to and from the water’s edge. It felt secret, protected, even though nothing in the Wilderness ever is.

She looked at Agnes.

“You’re filthy,” she said. Agnes’s bronzed hair was now matted with dirt. Her skin shimmered as the fine sand that coated her caught the light.

Agnes smiled shyly to hide her laugh. “You’re filthy.” Her cracked tooth making her smile impossibly goofy, cracking Bea’s heart.

“Let’s get something for a fire and then take a dip before the sun leaves,” Bea said and took Agnes’s hand.

*

They were dripping dry and shivering, and Bea admitted to herself that perhaps the swim was not her best idea. How stupid it would be to survive a violent dust storm only to bathe themselves to death.

They’d gathered stems and grass for a fire and now searched for something to cook over it. Bea wanted meat and fat to ward off the cold that she could now smell in the air. The geese were pecking around the pond, and she and Agnes crouched in the shore grasses with Bea’s slingshot. Around them, frogs croaked, and worst case, Bea thought, they could catch some of them, roast them, and nibble their legs and around their gooey middles. Agnes was in a pensive mood, and so Bea just concentrated on the geese, getting to know them before she made any moves. They hadn’t been scared off by the swim. A good sign. But if they spooked and flew now, she and Agnes would be hungry.

Agnes’s head snapped to attention. Bea thought she must have heard something ominous, but Agnes’s eyes widened and she asked, “Did Carl do this?”

“Did Carl do what?”

“Make the wind?”

“Honey, of course not. Why did you think that?”

“Because he told us that someday we’d have to split up. Now we’re split up.”

Amazing how earnest she seems, Bea thought, as though she believes Carl has sway over dust. Then, Bea got a chill. It wasn’t an absurd thing to think, she realized. There was something unsettling in how much Carl was capable of. How useful he had made himself. To a child, someone like that might seem capable of anything.

“No, sweetheart,” Bea said, “he didn’t do this. It’s just a coincidence.”

“What’s that?”

“Well,” Bea said, “it’s when things happen that seem related but aren’t.”

“That’s weird. Isn’t everything related?”

“Well, not everything.”

Agnes said under her breath, “Yes, everything.”

“Of course you would think that, because here everything does seem related. But trust me. Where I’m from, not everything is related. And sometimes things just happen.” She nodded to finish the thought. But she felt rattled. The idea that something was happening that was bigger than them started to seep under her skin.

They were quiet, listening to two frogs find each other in the water.

“Did Nana live in a house?”

“When she was young.”

“I wish I could live in a house.”

Bea scrunched her face. “You do?”

“They’re pretty,” Agnes said. She said it boldly, asserting this new feeling of being right.

“How do you know?” She didn’t think Agnes had ever seen a house. Maybe she thought Posts were houses? But they weren’t very pretty.

“The magazine,” she said, bold at having snooped at Bea’s hidden things.

The magazine she had stashed away had new design trends and spreads of modern, styled apartments like hers, but what made it one of the most popular magazines in circulation were the vintage spreads it printed every month. Scenes from the archives. Of the old days. Old estates, sprawling penthouses, rustic-chic farms, front porches, lawns, and even sky blue pools, views of landscapes that were nice to look at, of attics, of homes in all sorts of weather. These were astonishing to look at now. Such things didn’t exist anymore.

“You’re right, those houses were very pretty. But they’re gone.”

“Why are they gone?”

“That is a big question.”

“And?”

“They just are. Those places are all in the City now, and you remember, it doesn’t look like that at all.”

“But what was it like?”

“Where Nana lived?”

“Yeah, when she grew up.”

Stories from her mother’s childhood formed a dreamlike picture that entered her mind, a series of snapshots rather than movies. Bea clung to them, perhaps because they were so far away and strange. So unattainable. When her mother had grown up on an oak-lined street of single-family houses, the world had been a very different place. They had been in the middle of a timeline, rather than at the precipitous end of it. It allowed for the memories to seem sweet. They were benign fables. She tried not to indulge Agnes with stories of the City, even though her daughter asked often to be reminded of it. But Bea didn’t want the City to become mythic. They lived here now, and Agnes shouldn’t have to wonder about life elsewhere. But these descriptions of a house in a place that no longer had houses were like favorite bedtime stories, the colors worn and the pages frayed. Something for the imagination. Harmless, she thought.

She said, “Sit next to me.”

Agnes crawled closer.

“Your nana used to tell me all about it. It was pretty, as you guessed. The houses were old and they had lots of lovely ornate things on the doors and the ceilings. They had these things called fireplaces, and that was a thing where you make a fire inside a house.”

“That’s weird.”

“It is. But it was really nice. The houses had big front yards, and the people who lived there planted flowers and pretty bushes and trees and in spring everything smelled good. And birds and bees would come, and skunks would amble from the bushes and scare Nana, and squirrels would chatter at her when she walked by their tree.”

“Like here.” Agnes was amazed.

“A lot like here. Now this was a long time ago. But Nana used to go to a park down the street and there was a big pond and there were geese that lived there and she would watch them.”

“Near where she slept?”

“Yes, just down the street from her house. And she would watch the geese and think how lucky they were to have such a lovely pond, so quiet. Sometimes in the early morning she’d go down and there’d be mist on the pond, the lily pads would look silver in the light.” It was as if she were describing a picture, or something she herself had seen. Bea didn’t know where her mother’s memories ended and her own began.

“We’ve seen that here,” Agnes said, an edge creeping in. Trying not to be impressed.

“We have. We’ve seen many beautiful things. That’s my point. I look at the geese here, and I see the view they have. So dramatic, so unique. They must feel lucky. They must know other geese don’t have it as good. Don’t you think?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, guess.”

“Are there geese other places?”

Bea assumed there must be geese elsewhere, just not in the City. But now she didn’t know. And what of those other lands in heavy use? The cities of greenhouses, the rolling landfills, the sea of windmills, the Woodlots, the Server Farms. What of the lands that had long ago been abandoned? The Heat Belt, the Fallow Lands, the New Coast. Was it possible they were dramatic and unique? Many of them had been at one time. It was hard to believe they still could be. She hated to think about all those places, what they once were, what they were now. Bea shrugged. “I only know about the geese right here,” she said, pointing. “And the only difference is that the geese on Nana’s pond were safe. They were stupid in their behaviors. Waddling on people’s lawns, in the road. Leading goslings across the road. Trucks would have to stop for them. They weren’t scared. Where she lived, there were no predators, and people tended to protect animals. I think the geese knew that. Here, the geese are cautious because they have predators and we’re one of them.”

“What happened to the pond?”

“The pond was filled in and the geese left and Nana left soon after.”

“Before you were born?”

“Long before I was born.”

“Where did the geese go?”

“I don’t know. Nowhere. There wasn’t anywhere to go. Maybe here. Maybe that’s them.”

“They’d be old.”

“Maybe.”