“Once, we all spoke the same language,” her grandmother said. “Not just people but everything living. We were able to understand the exact meaning of the wind rushing through trees. Dog barks. Other people too. There’s a song of the universe that we all felt.”

Ayanna chewed on an especially large mushroom she had picked out of the congealed cheese on the pizza box’s bottom. Her heart thrilled for the first time since she saw the silver mountains. She could barely make out the garden. The idea of being able to hear the secrets of plants pushing out from the dirt, to hear what algae had to gossip about, and to walk out into a world filled with more and more things to know.

“Maybe, if you have to see them for the rest of your life,” Ayanna’s grandmother said, “you’ll at least get a chance to learn that language.”

Ayanna nodded. She didn’t care if her grandmother could see it or not.

“Maybe,” her grandmother said. She stopped and shook her head. “I don’t know why I’m saying that word so much. But maybe when we die, that’s the payment. Your soul returns to that language. If it’s willing. And now you have your whole life to learn that language again.”

Ayanna was too angry at herself for becoming a person who cried when she heard the word death to hear what her grandmother was saying. She stood up and went back inside. She scrubbed the kitchen clean. Her father was out again. The countertops and knives gleamed.

Then, in the morning, it was reported for the first time since they had all appeared, all the doors were gone. It will be fine, Ayanna told herself. She picked all the ripe tomatoes—the heirlooms, the Romas, because her dad had called San Marzanos pretentious, the big yellow boys, the little cherries she still liked to squish between her fingers to feel like a giant—and put them on the table. Ayanna made sauces, she had learned how to can, it would all be fine, the doors would come back, Olivia would return, she sliced tomatoes and covered them in basil, olive oil, pepper, and salt. She did not go to the field and watch the scientists gather soil samples. She did not go to school the next week when it started up again. She did not ask her father what had happened to make her mother stop coming over.

“I think you need to go live with your grandmother,” her dad said on a Tuesday morning while Ayanna watched The Price Is Right and made a salsa. A college bro was shaming himself at Punch-a-Bunch. Every punch, an epic fail for both prize money and his own dignity. He was punching in a way to clearly make himself feel tough while doing it. A kee-yah there, a grunt over there. He didn’t even look blazed. Ayanna shook her head.