it, it was pretty slim, pulled out a bill without looking, slipped it in his back pocket. Not a big deal but his heart beat faster, slightly, because it was an asshole thing to do, to steal from your boss for no reason except you were shitty bored. He sat back down at the desk and opened another beer.
It started with an average procedure. Vivian had a French professor and the French professor had a sister; the sister was having throat surgery and would be a l’hopital pour une semaine. Vivian had an ear for almost silent endings. A week became a month. A minor complication; another surgery. The month lingered. Vivian tried not to think of the body and all its soft organs but she did what she could: watered the plants, sorted bills, fed the fish. House one: single-family condo, well maintained.
Posted at the local video rental place was a flier: parents seeking a house sitter while they moved their son out west, References From The College Required. The Douglas family—dried eucalyptus wreaths on every window, a damp basement, a freezer full of low-sodium TV dinners. Vivian watched game show reruns and flipped through albums of old family photographs, page after page of weddings and birthdays. Yellow dresses, yellow cakes. House two: split-level, two-bedroom, detached garage.
One week in July: a friend of a friend’s cousin, just married. The newlyweds were going on holiday and Vivian had nowhere else to be. She took in the paper, smuggled whiskey from the bar. The cousin’s name was Kitty. Music from the strip mall’s Mexican restaurant accessorized the neighborhood all night, like colored lights strung on Christmas trees—tinny and cheerful and relentless. House three: suburban ranch, wall-to-wall carpet, beige.
House after house after apartment. Bedrooms and kitchens and back doors and deadbolts. How similar they became, all the different rooms in all the different towns, each one as familiar as it was strange. Every oversized breadbox. Every welcome mat. All the guitar cases in all the closets stashing ordinary porn.
When she ran out of houses, the worst were nights spent in the bus station, so when it came down to that, she did what she could. And breaking in was easy. Mail piled up near the door, lights automatic at dusk, curtains never drawn—chances were the house was empty. She cased neighborhoods that way, kept track of where she might go next, religiously considered her alternatives.
This was how people lived: they left keys under their flowerpots, taped them inside their mailboxes, snapped magnetic boxes inside the wheel wells of their cars. They left windows unlocked like they were leaving instructions. Here, the bar’s not soldered. Slide it out and the window practically opens itself. Here, the deadbolt sticks so be sure to pull forward then turn.
The first time, it was winter. The back door was unlocked; she held her breath and counted by twos to a hundred, a nervous habit. She stayed three days. Slept on the couch, left the lights off in the afternoon, drank water straight from the tap. She took a Polaroid of the kitchen: a sick argyle of green and yellow tiles, rotting pears on the table. She couldn’t say she wasn’t nervous. The second time was a year later. An ex-boyfriend’s house. She meant to stay for the entire Memorial Day weekend. The family had a wedding to attend in Connecticut; Vivian had backed out of the trip months before. She knew where the spare key was kept, which brick was loose behind the shed. She’d spent Thanksgiving with Mason’s family—his parents, his brothers, their wives, his younger sister—but hadn’t been back since. They’d been so nice. She hated it. She wasn’t in love with Mason and it didn’t seem fair, all that warmth. All that generosity made her sick to her stomach. All the ways she wasn’t gracious.
The afternoon of the wedding, Vivian wandered in and out of rooms, taking photographs from the thresholds. When she’d used up the roll, she mostly sat at the dining room table and thought about that holiday. Sometimes she wished she could go back. Sometimes she missed how Mason’s fingers stung her everywhere he touched, from the softest, untoned parts of her inner thighs to her wrists.
By evening, she gave up. She’d miscalculated how full of regret grief could make you, even if the grief had more to do with abstract longing than desire for a particular thing. She hadn’t been in love with Mason, but she had wanted to be in love with him, and that meant she couldn’t stay there like a stranger, which was the only way she allowed herself to stay anywhere. The only rule she had. She left the house as soon as it turned dark. Slid the brick in place and walked all the way to the bus station.
Back inside, Vivian flipped through the newspaper while she waited for the water to boil. Death notices, D-8; she skimmed columns for her name. Olivia M. Frommer, 36, survived by two daughters, a husband, a mother, grandmothers on both sides. Richard Nelson Fost, born 1927; survived by wife, Ava Fost, and stepson, Edward Case. Morgan Vargas Fitzgerald: 62, no survivors. This was Vivian’s sad math, a fucked up game of points for the number of times her name and its variants appeared in the daily obits. First name proper was five. Names like Victoria, Vera, Vernon, Violet, Veronica were two. Foster was five points. Something like Fost counted once, and so did Olivia, because it contained Liv which resembled Viv. Middle name, half-point. Significant combinations or listings with her initials in order counted three points. VMF. One for each. That was how Vivian kept track of how close she was to dying. The fewer points the better. Each name that didn’t match hers reduced her odds a little. That morning she counted three, and three was safer than ten.
Three was safer than ten. So Vivian left the house. Helen had mentioned a market nearby and pointed the way downtown, so she headed in that direction. She would establish a routine. Routine established purpose, a trick Vivian had learned to feel less like a visitor. Though, if she was being honest about it, community and stability weren’t what she sought from her profession. This time felt different, if she couldn’t exactly pinpoint how. But she noticed it as she walked—zipping her jacket against the damp, pulling the collar close at her neck—that she didn’t feel the familiar drumming urgency to be anonymous, an outsider on the periphery slipping in and out of towns, giving fake names to fellow subway passengers, baristas, guys at bars. Here was a place, apparently, where someone could just vanish into thin air. What else could happen in a place like that.
At the market she weighed grapefruits. There was an announcement: reduced cakes. Vivian paced the aisles looking for the bread, found it, chose multiple grains. At the checkout she touched the slick corner of a celebrity magazine but did not buy it. She handed over her twenty-dollar bill and said thank you for the change.
On her walk back to the house, Vivian counted eight cicada shells. It was the season of nostalgia, August turning into September, almost her birthday, which was their birthday. She could almost forget she had a brother, since they hadn’t been in touch for years. He was obscured, he was part time, he was in hiding. He was a mime. He was no forwarding address/no longer at this address/undeliverable. He was a postcard back in March that said I am an exhibit at the state fair. They were twins, but that didn’t mean much that Vivian could vouch for. They weren’t psychically connected. Vivian and Seth weren’t aligned in some intrinsic, magical twin way and never had been. All they had in common was their gift for evasion. It was hereditary, in their family—the one quality you could point to that connected them. Evasive, evading, evaded. He evaded the law. He evaded the question. It was their mother’s fault—she was the queen of evasion, having grown up ringside after seasonal ringside, the perma-costumed daughter of parents who worked the small-time carnivals. The names of those setups were fixed in her memory from stories her mother told: Bayside Marvels (New Madrid, MO); Land of Wonders (Carbon, UT); Point Mercenary Daylong Enchantments (Sulphur, LA). And here it was, the end of another summer. The two-headed calf was stumbling his final parade around the ring. The fire eater’s awkward teenage assistant was dismantling the portable coaster, trying to forget the acne blushing painfully over half his face.
Vivian hardly heard the footsteps before someone rushed past her, running down the sidewalk. He would’ve run her over if she’d moved left; the person was oblivious. Startled into pausing there on the sidewalk, she watched as he dodged off. Lanky guy,
