Agnes straightened back up, took a deep, careful breath of different air, and saw Dolores watching her. The girl hid partway behind one of the wayward shacks, a corner of wood-crate scrap, part of which read, Regal.

Dolores performed a few feeble coughs into her hand, mirroring Agnes’s fit. Agnes imagined Dolores was trying to sympathize. Maybe it was her secret handshake. Yes, she’d most likely been sick too. She looked like she had, recently. She was skinny, her hair dull, her skin sallow. The dark under her eyes. The way she was so bound and careful in her body, as though a thoughtless move could bring on a painful coughing spasm. Agnes remembered it all somewhere in her body.

“Hey,” Agnes said. Dolores’s eyes got wide and bright, as though stunned to be seen. “How are you?”

Dolores’s gulp was audible, but she stepped out from behind her shed and carefully over to Agnes.

“Why aren’t there more kids like you and your brother in the group?” Agnes asked.

Again Dolores’s eyes bugged at being asked a real question. She shrugged with her whole body as if to beg Agnes to believe her. She did not know.

She sat down and held out a small rubber ball and rolled it to Agnes’s feet in the sand. She motioned for Agnes to roll it back, and so Agnes knelt.

“There was one,” Dolores said.

“Oh,” said Agnes.

“How many years are you?”

“I don’t know,” said Agnes.

“Really?”

“Really. I might be thirty years old. But probably I’m a lot younger than that. How old are you?”

“I’m three plus.”

“That’s nice.”

“Are there flowers here?”

“There are many flowers here, but only during certain times of the year.”

“What time of the year is it?”

“It’s the fall.”

“Are there flowers now?”

“Not really.”

Dolores’s eyes were big, and her small mouth pursed in thought. She was lucky to be here. To be here and getting better. Agnes imagined that somewhere deep down she might know that. Briefly Agnes’s mind was flooded with the image of a little ill Dolores sputtering blood uncontrollably, as Agnes herself had done. It was a vile and violent image, and she pushed it quickly from her mind. It was okay to remember herself like that, but it seemed cruel to put someone else through it, even if it was only in her imagination.

When they had first arrived in the Wilderness State, Agnes had been one of five children. Sister and Brother were still here, but Ali died quickly. Perhaps too sick already to handle such a physical life. There were other dangers here. The adults must have understood that.

She remembered Flor leaving when her mother, Maria, decided it had been a mistake to come. Her mother had gotten scared after the first death, and after a bear raided their camp. No one was hurt, but the bear refused to leave, luxuriating and shitting on their beds and trying to eat all their provisions. They went without food for two days while they stalked it, waiting for an opportunity to kill it. There were some hungry days while they figured it all out. At the next Post, Maria went to the Ranger at the front desk and said, “I surrender.”

“Surrender? Surrender what?”

“I don’t know. I renounce my Wilderness citizenship.”

“Lady, what the fuck are you talking about?”

“I want to go home.”

“Well, okay, then. Go home.”

She stared at him blankly. “How?”

He pulled out a piece of paper. “Bus schedule. When you know the time you want to go, we can call you a taxi.” Maybe they’d been there a month.

During the next spring Debra got a letter at Post from Maria. Little Flor had died.

“Well, she might have died here too.” Debra forced a shrug. There were no guarantees.

Agnes smiled, and Dolores looked at her face seriously for a moment, then offered a small uncertain smile. Agnes had been a bit older than Dolores when she had arrived. She couldn’t think of how it might feel to be three years old here. She wanted to say something that would make the uncertainty in Dolores’s face go away.

“Dolores,” Linda barked, and Dolores sprinted off to her mother. Linda peered at Agnes with curiosity and distrust as her daughter slipped under her arm, the safest place, like a chick under wing. Dolores’s face became serene. Agnes felt an aching absence. She remembered being that young, that easily safe. Agnes was happy to be an adult now. But she missed feeling safe like that. It was gone from her life for good.

With so many new faces to look at, she realized, she had not imagined her mother’s face since before they’d entered the dark forest. Every day before that she’d woken in the middle of a dream of her mother’s face. Not of her. Just of her face hovering over everything the dream presented or told. In a dream where a coyote pack attacked their camp, her mother’s face was the moon, glowing over the carnage. In a dream of finding a hidden bunch of wild onions under her pillow, once the dirt was brushed from the small white bulb, her mother’s face appeared in its pearly skin. Her mother was the face of an owl Agnes had startled while on a frog-catching walk with Val. No, that had to have been real, not a dream. They had caught frogs and snails for dinner. And her mother had peered down at them with irritation. Agnes swore she’d seen her mother’s terrible face. Her angry mother, still angry at her.

Celeste shuffled up to Agnes with what seemed like pure dread in her body.

“Ugh,” she said, looking at Agnes expectantly.

“Ugh?” Agnes asked.

“UGH,” Celeste said with more emphasis, her eyes surveying the shanty demolition. “This is so dumb,” she clarified.

“Why?”

Celeste pouted. “I miss my little house.”

“In the City?” Agnes asked.

Celeste rolled her eyes. “No, here. It had a little window with flowery drapes. It had a smooth floor that I danced across and it smelled like roses.”

“You’re lying,” Agnes said. “Nothing smells like roses here.” She didn’t remember the last time she’d smelled a rose. All she smelled was brine and rot and salt and fir.

Celeste shook her head. “I’m pretending, stupid.”

Agnes nodded, but she wasn’t sure what the difference was between pretending and lying.

Celeste said, “Besides, where would I get drapes? And there’s nothing smooth for a million miles. But it makes me feel better.”

“Why do you need to feel better?”

“Because I’m sad.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t want to be here.”

“Oh.” Agnes looked down at the ground overcome, her mind racing. Chasing after something. A feeling. What was it? It was right at the tips of her reaching fingers—

“I was sad too,” she sputtered, almost breathless.

“When?” Celeste said, her eyes slits, ready to take vengeance if she were made a fool.

“When I got here.”

Celeste looked at the ants marching over Agnes’s dirty moccasins, the stains on her smock from where she wiped her hands. Her hard dirt-smeared arms. The mud under her nails. “You were.” She said it with skepticism.

“Yes,” Agnes said slowly, the memory piecing itself together after being broken for so many years. She hadn’t wanted to come here. She hadn’t wanted to leave her friends. No matter how much blood she coughed up. She hadn’t wanted to leave her pink bed. The bed her mother remade every morning so it looked as it might in a magazine. She hadn’t really understood where they were going or what it would be like. But she could tell in the way her mother tensed her shoulders, tried to straighten her back to seem stronger, that it was a hard place. That there was danger. That her mother was afraid. And she looked around at their small but pleasant home and wondered, Why? Why would they leave a place they knew for a place they didn’t know? She must have been four at that time, going on five. She’d worn socks with lace at the cuff just like Dolores had on, and she’d had braids too, just like Dolores. Her mother braided her hair when it was still wet from the bath the night before. Her hair would fray in a halo around her head from dreamy bouts with her pillow. She would go to the preschool in the basement of her building. She took naps and listened to stories there. She shared juice pouches with her friends. What were their names? She couldn’t remember. She might remember them if her mother had spoken their names since they left. Told her stories of Agnes’s life. But her mother only told stories of her own mother, Nana, or of Grandma, her own mother’s mother, or of herself and Agnes. Agnes felt angry at her mother’s self-centeredness. But then she remembered her mother wouldn’t know any stories of Agnes and her friends. These were Agnes’s private memories. How they squirted their juice pouches to make rainbows on the concrete, how they played with one another’s hair during story time. She had forgotten the names of the girls she had shared those moments with. Those times were also times Agnes had been without her mother. The first and last times she had been on her own, until now.

She had a thought just then.

“No one really wanted to be here,” she said to Celeste. “But we had to be.”

“No one?” Celeste asked.

“Well, Carl probably did.”