Chapter 23

SOMEWHERE IN THE MIDWEST

We’re an hour outside Little Rock, the sun just starting to dip, when Cleo swings a right off the highway.

“Whoa,” Mick says. He’s on navigation, riding shotgun with Puddles in his lap. Sadie sits next to me, and Silas is asleep in the back seat, one long arm thrown over his eyes. “Wrong turn, maestro. You’re on 40 for another seventy miles.”

“Don’t question me, Michelangelo,” Cleo says. She has her big yellow sunglasses on and is blowing bubble gum with loud smacks. “We’re going to a point of interest.”

“What point of interest?” Mick asks, at the same moment I say, “Is your full name Michelangelo?”

He laughs. “I wish. It’s just Michael.”

“Don’t sell yourself short, just Michael,” Cleo says. She hangs another right and suddenly we’re on a gravel road, Arkansas spreading flat and arid around us. “You’re Michael fucking Selinofoto. My moonlight baby.”

“Where are we going?” Silas asks, his voice gravelly with sleep. When I look back he’s stretching, T-shirt hiking up to expose a thin strip of his stomach, and I look quickly away. At anything, anything else. “Rest stop?”

“We are going,” Cleo says patiently but emphatically, “to a point of interest.”

“How far is it?” Sadie asks, glancing at her watch. “Just want to remind the group that our ETA is three thirty in the morning and some of us aren’t as spry as others.”

“You don’t look a day past twenty,” Silas says, and Sadie rolls her eyes.

“It’s fifteen minutes away,” Cleo says. “And it’s going to be worth it, okay? So everyone calm the eff down.”

“How’d you find it?” I ask, and she catches my eyes in the rearview.

“I googled it while you were studying the space-time continuum or whatever it is you’re doing back there.”

I glance at my lap, where the Penn textbook is open to a diagram of the four different types of glial cells. “It’s biology,” I say, and Cleo gags.

“Disgusting. Why?”

“I’m taking a course—” I catch myself, amending: “My boyfriend, Ethan, is taking a course at the University of Pennsylvania this summer. It’s where I was supposed to be, instead of here.”

“So you’re not taking the course,” Mick clarifies, turning in the front seat to look at me.

I clear my throat. “I mean, technically—”

“She’s not taking the course,” Cleo says loudly, spreading her hand over the center console to emphasize every word, “but she’s reading the textbook back there like a freaking librarian instead of enjoying our great American landscape.”

I glance out the window, flat farmland as far as the eye can see. “I can still learn,” I say, trying to keep the edge out of my words. “Even if I’m not there.”

“Or you could just be here,” Cleo says. “You know, be here. Instead of—”

“Cleo,” Sadie says. Her voice is soft, but Cleo stops immediately. “Give it a rest.”

I can’t bring myself to meet anyone’s eyes. I don’t need Sadie to defend me; the way I’m choosing to spend my summer doesn’t need defending at all. Cleo doesn’t even know me. She has no idea—

“There,” Cleo says. “The sign.”

All four of us turn to look out the window as we pass a massive metal sign hand-painted with the words Mailbox Station, USA.

“‘Mailbox Station’?” Mick rights himself in his seat, turning back to her. “I’m not sold so far, Clementine.”

“Don’t call me that,” she says, pointing a finger at him. “And please hold your judgment until we’re fully on the premises.”

Cleo drives past a crop of dense trees, and when we round the corner we’re suddenly in a postage stamp of a parking lot with hundreds of mailboxes spread out in front of us. They’re all different colors, materials, eras. Our car is the only one in the lot, so Cleo pulls right up to the fence that separates the parking spaces from the field of mailboxes.

“Let’s go,” she says, throwing the van into park. “To Sadie’s point, we don’t have all day. Also, someone else is driving when we’re done here.”

We pile out of the van and Silas takes Puddles from Mick, hurrying ahead of us as she drags him over to a patch of grass. The rest of us cluster at the entrance of Mailbox Station, where a plastic box with a clear lid sits full of notepaper and envelopes. A golden plaque on its front reads Take what you need so you can leave what you need. And next to it, a sign with a lockbox attached: Lovingly maintained by our amazing volunteers. Mick digs in his pockets, dropping in a few quarters, and Cleo says, “Do they have a credit card reader or what?”

Mick snorts and drags her into the rows of mailboxes as Sadie pulls a ten out of her wallet and sticks it in the lockbox.

“Shall we?” She motions me ahead of her, so I step into the labyrinth and duck to look into a mailbox. Some of them have stacks of letters inside, some are empty, some house just one lonely note. They’re all splashed with different handwriting:

For Max

To Adeline, wherever you are

To Daddy—miss you

I look around, breathing in the heat. There’s something reverent about the air out here, moving through all these left-behind words.

“There are no addresses,” I say, almost to myself.

“I think that’s probably the point.” Sadie looks over at me, a few mailboxes ahead. “Things you wish you’d be brave enough to say for real, you know? Or what you’d say to someone who can’t hear it. Someone who’s gone.”

Mick and Cleo are far away now, peering into a set of retro red mailboxes side by side. I spot Silas by the parking lot, pulling a piece of paper out of the box with Puddles panting at his feet.

I look at Sadie and find her watching him, too. She smiles at me, and I wonder if we’re thinking about the same thing: Silas, and what he’d say to someone who’s gone.

“Elliott would love this,” she tells me, resting her hands on her hips and turning in a circle to take it all in. “He’s obsessed with the mail service, ever since we brought him home. We wait on the porch to say hi every single afternoon.”

“Brought him home?” I ask.

Sadie looks at me, eyes hidden by the reflection off her sunglasses. “He was eighteen months old when we adopted him.”

“How old is he now?”

“He was three in May,” she says, smiling. “And wilder by the day.”

I reach for the mailbox closest to me, lift its metal flag skyward and then tuck it back into place. “You miss him?”

“Oh, constantly,” Sadie laughs. “It’s like being hungry for your favorite food, but only the way your favorite restaurant makes it, and they’re closed all week. So you eat something else, and it fills you up, but it’s not the same.”

Across the field from us, Silas is licking the seal of an envelope and pressing it carefully closed. I think of my first year at the Summit School, the few futile letters I mailed to my mother. They were assignments—we practiced narrative writing by drafting handwritten notes to our parents. The language arts teacher made a big show of passing around stamps, of collecting the envelopes and stacking them neatly in a box for transport to the post office. I sent Camilla long, rambly messages about my days: about my new roommate, Fallon, and the spaghetti in the dining hall, and the way fresh snow made everything unnaturally quiet. I imagined her reading the letters in her great, sloping yard, overlooking the ocean. Missing me. The responses came weeks, sometimes months, afterward—unsigned Hallmark cards, my name and school address inked in Magnolia’s handwriting.

Silas starts across the field with Puddles and I look away from him, down at the grass. My cheeks burn with the memory: how desperately I’d reached out for my mother, and how transparently she didn’t care.

“Hey, listen,” Sadie says. I blink, looking up at her. “You did really great in Austin, with Dr. Kowalski.” I fidget under the praise; all I’ve ever wanted is to impress people, but I never know how to behave when they tell me I’ve done it. “I was talking to Camilla about it, and we think you should share more about your work this summer, during your appearances with her. Let people get to know you for what you’re so great at.” She watches me, trying to gauge my reaction. “If that’s something you’d be interested in.”

“My mom thinks that?” It comes out of me without any processing at all; I speak the words in the same moment they occur to me. It doesn’t make sense that my mother would want me to talk about this—my visits with doctors, my time with Sadie, the one part of this summer that’s not about Camilla. And since when do she and Sadie talk about me, anyways?

“We both do,” Sadie says slowly. She studies me for a beat, then adds, “At least consider it, okay? This tour is about both of you—you should get to share your experience, too, if it’s something you want.”

A butterfly flits past, and I watch the shudder of its wings in the thick July heat. It is something I want, isn’t it? To be known for who I am, apart from her.

“Either way,” Sadie says, starting to move back toward the car, “tomorrow will be great. Dr. Bautista was actually my physical therapist when I was doing my postdoc—he was on rotation in Michigan and I swear he saved my back after so much nonstop standing in the lab....”

I let the rest of her sentence melt into the shimmering heat, into all the other words swirling between us in this place. Separated from us by rows of metal flags and letters, Silas has stopped in front of a wood-paneled, white-painted mailbox. He looks down at the envelope in his hands, balanced in both palms like something precious and breakable. Puddles waits patiently in the grass, like even she knows to give him time. And then he slides the letter into the box and lifts the little red flag.

It’s stupid—nonsensical and illogical and as unscientific as something can get. This entire place is built on feelings, no hard facts to it at all.

But still, I find myself hoping that they get the message. Whoever it is Silas is reaching out for.

Ethan calls me at nearly ten o’clock, when we’re driving through the endless flatlands of southern Illinois. I’ve just finished my turn at the wheel and am hidden in the dark in the third row of seats, Silas driving with one hand pushed through his hair to prop his head against the windowsill. Cleo is curled in the passenger seat with Puddles in her lap, both of them snoring softly.

“Hey,” I whisper, my voice as quiet as I can get it. But even still, even over the music wafting from the van’s speakers, Silas looks up to catch my eye in the rearview. I look away first.

“Hey,” Ethan says. He sounds wide awake, as ready to jump into the lecture notes as he always is. “You make it to Chicago?”

“Ah, not yet,” I say, playing with the frayed hem of my shorts. “Our flight got pushed to tomorrow, so we’re actually road-tripping up there so I can make it to this physical therapy meeting by morning.”

“Road-tripping?” Ethan says. “Your mom?”

I breathe a laugh, leaning my head back against the seat. “Of course not. She’s flying out tomorrow.”

“So you’re with Dr. Stone?”

“Dr. Stone,” I repeat, feeling nervous for no reason. These are just the facts, just the people I’m spending my summer with. “And the interns.”

“Sorry, who?” Ethan’s voice goes crackly, and I sit up straighter.

“The interns?” I say, keeping my voice even. “Mick, and Cleo, and—”

“Audrey?” Static fuzz, and then nothing. I look down at my phone, call failed, zero bars in its upper right corner. I draw a steady breath, and Sadie’s voice reaches toward me through the dark car.

“Everything all right?”

“Yeah,” I say, dropping the useless phone into my bag. “No service out here.”

In the shadows past Sadie and Mick, Puddles jumps down from Cleo’s lap and makes her way toward me, picking through the backpacks and empty fast food bags on the floor. I’m staring at her, unsure what to do, when she leaps onto the back row of seats beside me. My legs are tucked underneath me, ankles splayed out to one side, and she curls into me before dropping onto her belly and resting her fuzzy chin on my foot.

We look at each other—her big, dark eyes pooling up the night and reflecting it back at me. When I glance toward the front of the van, Silas is watching us in the rearview, a small smile on his face. He looks back at the road, and I look back at Puddles, and her eyes fall shut. A hot little breath puffs from her nose onto my ankle.

What the hell, I think. She’s already sleeping. So I let her stay there, chin to foot, as my own eyes fall shut. And I sleep—the van lulling us through the quiet midwestern dark—the rest of the way to Chicago.