Ovenshine

21.

Indy wakes with the scent of campfire smoke still clinging to her hair. She stays where she is for a moment, blinking away that disorienting, bizarre sensation of waking in a bed in a room that isn't hers: the comforter against her shoulders dense like a weight, bright blue wall in front of her like something in a hospital or a daycare center.

She sits up. The guest room she's staying in also appears to double as a display room for the Mitchells' various travel trinkets, and the glass shelf across from her upon which they sit gleams dully in the grayish morning light. There's beach sand and seashell shards in tiny corked bottles. Snow globes and painted clay figures and bobblehead turtles and psychedelic scarves. A felt hand adorned with semi-precious rings and hand-woven bracelets, reaching up towards nothing. Mexico and Nigeria and Thailand and the U.K.—they've touched almost every continent, and brought something back.

Indy listens for a moment, but hears no movement in the house, no floorboards creaking or voices speaking or water running. Her phone tells her it's barely past seven in the morning, and she should probably just go back to sleep.

She doesn't. She tugs a sweatshirt on over her pajamas and tiptoes to the hall bathroom to freshen up. Then she slips outside.

The backyard looks haunted. Thick gray fog hangs in the air like a curtain, clinging to the sparse birch trees from top to trunk. She can only see the trees just in front of her, at the beginning of the cobblestone path. The rest disappear as lanky, limbless shadows into the murk.

The grass is freshly cut and dewy, more gray than green beneath the obscured sun, the scent of it strong and sylvan. It squelches beneath Indy's shoes as she walks. A cool wind brushes across her face, but it's refreshing, like a bite of mint. Her mind's clear and the birds are singing, one long, trilling note over and over again.

Everything has suddenly become so real, as if Elizabeth Dobbs's words have sketched over it all, bolding every outline. Never before has a project ever meant this much to her, asked this much of her. She thinks of Percy in the attic, kneeling, pressing a band-aid over the cut in her leg. Is he right? Is all of this too much for her hands to hold?

She hears footsteps. Rapid—someone running. Apprehension tenses each one of her muscles, until she sees Percy, in basketball shorts and a T-shirt dark with sweat, earbuds tucked in his ears. He jogs through the mist, skidding to a stop when he notices her there.

"Jesus Christ, you scared the shit out of me," he says, popping one of his earbuds out, though he's still speaking louder than usual. "I thought you were some mythical bog woman for a second."

"You just came running out of an eerie cloud of fog, you realize that, right? If anyone's the mythical bog woman, it's you," Indy says, and Percy cackles at this. "What are you doing up so early?"

He shrugs. The words come out fast: "I didn't sleep well; I just needed to get up and move. You?"

Something similar, she supposes. Her desire to be awake had simply outweighed her desire to be asleep. "The guest room creeps me out," she says. "I don't think I like all the bobbleheads staring at me while I'm sleeping."

"You'll get used to it."

"Will I?"

"They're bobbleheads. They can't hurt you," Percy says, fanning himself with his shirt and starting forward again—though walking now, gratefully. From here Indy can barely see the faded white brick of the house, the black shingles like the crest of a mountain just barely piercing through the fog. "Walk back with me? I'll see if I can find some coffee or something in the kitchen."

She falls into step next to him, and though she tries to keep her mind from wandering to the past, in a place like this she can't help it. She can't remember the last time she was here in the birch labyrinth of Percy's backyard, but she certainly knows it was long before now, when her biggest problems were mastering multiplication tables and picking out a training bra. They passed so many afternoons here, running barefoot until their hearts were thudding in their chests like living drums, hide and seek as weighty as war. She holds so much more understanding now. So much more space for perception. Sometimes she wishes she didn't.