There was Sally, the lady who ran the flower shop. She was willowy and about seventy, and her flowers were exquisite and delicate, but she would sometimes leave the counter in the middle of a sale because she heard the baby crying. She’d hold up a knobby finger. “Let me just check on the baby,” she’d say, and then disappear, usually for the rest of the afternoon. There had never been a baby as far as anyone knew, but Sally would appear in the windows of the apartment above the shop, pacing, like she was walking an infant to sleep.

There were the Metzgers. They were trashier than we were. A whole family of boys, a dead mom, a dad who started drinking cheap beer at breakfast. I’d gone to school with two of them. I was often mistaken for the youngest, Kyle. We had a similar slight build, blond hair—two flannel-wearing, cigarette-smoking, truck-driving losers in the same town. Except that Kyle was hopelessly straight and dumb as a box of fucking rocks. My mother bought oxys and benzos from him. Nobody in town knew how they even made it, but I knew for a fact that my mother gave Kyle a hundred a week for pills.

And there was my mother, Pearl Jenkins, who rarely went into town but would drive in to pick up her prescription or to get things from the farmers’ market in the summer. She dressed like a crazy hippie. Most of the time her hair was dirty and she smelled. In the summer, she was always barefoot. People knew her as paranoid and disabled, even though she got around okay. We lived in the woods, surrounded by security cameras. People would say her husband tried to kill her and their son.

The cairns on the side of the road were what stopped me. They might have been there all along, but the day I noticed them, it was like they’d grown overnight. A balanced pile of rocks that seemed impossible, a bigger stone on top of all the rest, touching at only a narrow point. It was two feet high, visible from my bike as I whizzed past. I skidded to a stop a few yards ahead and backtracked.

There were two. One close to the road, and another, similarly precarious, a few feet in. They marked the edge of a narrow dirt trail that followed a line of pine trees along Mill Road, where I rode my bike every day on the way home from the diner.

I looked off down the path. It led into the woods in such a way that I thought it might cut right through to my house. I’d been biking my way down Mill Road to Hidden Drive all this time, riding for miles around the edge of the woods.

It wasn’t dark yet, so I got off the bike and walked it beside me, following it alongside the trees and then deep into them, the woods cool and completely shaded, heady with pine needles, like the floor was spun with gold. Not far in, a ravine sloped off to the right, and people had dumped tires and old appliances down it. A whole washing machine lay on its side between tree roots and rock.