“Oh god,” I said, and I realized I was saying it out loud. My daughter was banging away. I felt dizzy. There was a pizza in the oven. My husband was finally fixing the latch on a window in our bedroom, which we’d been meaning to fix for four solid months. Our life, which was so boring and normal, was still happening. Right at this moment, as everything was changing, it was like my life didn’t know it yet. It didn’t know to just stop, to freeze, because nothing was going to be the same. Let the pizza burn. Forget about that stupid, shitty latch on the window. Pack up your stuff. Let’s get the hell out of here. Let’s burn down the house and start over. For a split second, I thought maybe just I could get out of here and start over.

“Was it you?” the reporter asked. Why had I picked up the phone?

“Yes,” I finally said, and I could feel my whole body being pulled through time. “Yes, it was me.”

“Just you?” she asked.

“It’s complicated,” I replied. My daughter was now standing beside me, pulling on the back of my shirt. “Mama?” she asked. “Who are you talking to?”

“Just a friend,” I told her.

“Let me talk to her,” Junie said, the most confident person I’d ever known, holding out her hand for the phone.

“I have to go,” I said to Mazzy.

“Can we meet?”

“No,” I said.

“Can I call you back?”

“Sorry, no,” I told her. And before she could say anything else, I hung up the phone.

I started to pace around the kitchen, trying to remember every word of the conversation, what I’d said to this woman. But Junie hates pacing, hates when she sees me go inside myself, and so she started tugging on my pants.

“What’s your friend’s name?” Junie asked.

“What? Oh . . . Mazzy,” I said.

“Mazzy sounds like an imaginary friend,” Junie said.

“Maybe she is,” I told her. “I’m not entirely sure that she’s real.”

“You’re so weird, Mama,” Junie said, smiling. And then, like it didn’t matter at all, because she’d already forgotten, she said, “Listen to me play these crazy drums!”

There was still time. I sat on the couch. And I watched my daughter, with two wooden spoons in her hands, absolutely whale away on anything that was around her. And my heart was pounding in my chest. It was over, I kept thinking. It was all over. And it was beginning. It was just beginning.

Part I

The Edge Is a Shantytown Filled with Gold Seekers

SUMMER 1996

One