They mounted the creaky porch. Now I let myself stare, and I was carried backward, closer to everything I’d tried to forget, past Taqueria La Vaquita, its picnic tables; down Chapel Hill Road, which was once a cow path; to Wa Wa Avenue, to the bungalow’s porch with its demented array of old bike parts, the swing, the cat-torn corduroy couch, where Isaac and I used to sit mostly naked in the lightning-bug evenings. There was the riotous gardenia bush, a nest of light and shadow. And behind I could almost see the train tracks slicing through the woods. And if I could see the tracks, I could see a freight train, and maybe Queen blowing by in a hammock in a boxcar. There was the life Berie would have been living, if she hadn’t come here and disappeared. A sob that seemed to have started a year ago began to rise up.

Isaac carried nothing but a plastic bag. I recognized its logo, a gridded arrangement of red concentric circles—Target, the store was called; I hadn’t thought about it in so long. We used to buy homewares at Target, rainbow measuring cups in collapsible silicone, baking pans with lids for the fridge, a brush for slicking egg wash onto loaves of bread. The brush fit into the category of unwashable kitchen tools, like a waffle iron, like a cast-iron pan, where you have to give up on your trust of soap. Like the clothes that say “spot-clean only.” How can you trust a thing that you can’t put in a washing machine? I used to wonder.

I could have left the clothes I wore now at the bottom of a river for days, and they’d have come out and still been all right. These phenomenally hard-wearing clothes that did not belong to me.

After the interminable morning and a lunch of beet thinnings and peppers, Osha permitted me to accompany Isaac to the barn. When we were out of eyeshot, I almost relaxed.

“Berie,” he said. It had been a year since anyone had called me that, and the name diminished me—the college-bound disappointment to her mother, the girl who lived a compromised life on the grid.

He smiled, with teeth. My Durham life was roaring back at me. I felt queasy, like when you stand at Kitty Hawk long enough that you, not the ocean, seem to be gliding forward and back. I didn’t want to slip back into my old self, the self that lived in half measures.

Because it seemed like the most normal thing to do, but not because I wanted to, I gave him a tight hug. Both of us had more meat on our bones than we had had in Durham. I was stronger. And he was more filled-in, grown-up. I allowed him to kiss my cheek.

“Short hair!” he said.