Betsy trails behind Austin, who follows Jen, who studies the slender rectangle of Amanda’s back as it winds through scrubby bushes. Ahead, Lake Michigan hurls itself against the beach. The four friends shuffle through prickly grass, kick aside pebbles and beer bottles, until cold sand rises between their bare toes. Betsy giggles at a spindly, self-important crab that scuttles along the edge of the tide. Behind them Chicago heaves and mutters. Horns blare on Lakeshore drive and the El rattles on its tracks. Jen makes a joke about a fisherman and a prostitute but nobody laughs. It’s March, too cold for other beach goers to appear, although there is a misty, capering figure in the bright distance, too far to label male or female. Austin unfolds four creaky chairs and everyone sits. Jen wiggles her turquoise-painted toes and Amanda lights a cigarette. Austin wishes he could read—he’s deep in a twisty sci-fi novel where aliens slip beneath human skins and devour organs—but they haven’t come to enjoy themselves. He steals a glance at Amanda’s profile. A long, moody face, a haphazard fall of curls. Not beautiful, but better. He tells himself for the hundredth time not to love her but his stupid heart flutters, dances disobediently away. Betsy and Jen don’t attract him. Betsy’s too bubbly, Jen too ascetic. In another fold of history maybe she’d be one of those desperate saints, muttering prayers, scourging her flesh, panicked when the darkness fell. All right, says Amanda. I guess you guys know why I called. I can take a guess, says Betsy, but why don’t you explain anyway. This isn’t a goddamn joke. Oh, but isn’t it? Isn’t it funny how we all shit ourselves—figuratively—when you call and scurry to do your bidding? I’m looking out for us. But play dumb if you want. This is where it happened. Surely you remember that? I do. If it is a thing that occurred, says Austin. It would have a local habitation and a name. But perhaps we imagine our nightmares instead of performing them. Perhaps it’s a matter of quantum entanglement. The uncertainty principle. Nothing is still until measured. The human eye is itself a tyrant. Oh Austin, Betsy sighs. Can’t you speak English for a few minutes? Enough, says Amanda. Bickering does nothing. Jen, what did they ask you? Well, they almost broke down our door banging on it. At ten at night. My roommate didn’t want to answer it. Don’t forget, we don’t live downtown like the rest of you. Sometimes there’s a body on the corner or some kid dealing fent. Knife fights. But eventually they yelled out who they were and we let them in and they asked for coffee. Did you make them some, Austin asks. I would say that would even the playing field, so to speak. No. We lied and told them we don’t drink it. I didn’t want them slobbering over our cups. They said they found a card. What kind of card? You know, just a birthday card. Shannon’s mom was cleaning out a closet and ran across this crumpled blue envelope. Inside, one of those cards with butterflies and a cutesy poem inside. Unsigned. They asked if one of us gave it to her. What did you say? I said not me, but didn’t know about the rest of you. An artifact, says Austin. A message in a bottle. Fascinating. Not fascinating at all, says Amanda. A damned nuisance. Well, speak up if you know anything about this card. There is a humming, oddly comfortable silence. A seagull veers through the hazy sky. Austin thinks about happy butterflies etched in iridescent lines, rhyming couplets in curly font. Someone must have loved her. Someone else, that is. Shannon’s eyes were green in a certain quality of light but charcoal-gray in others. When he kissed her he tasted menthol cigarettes, Black Jack gum, and something earthy and warm, like a small animal’s musk. In his memory she collapses, naked, laughing, onto his bed, which in those days was covered by a Noah’s Ark quilt. On the table were condoms, a smeared glass of gin and tonic, a Batman comic, and a lamp that buzzed intermittently, like an uncertain bee. That day he touched her everywhere there was to touch but it still won’t ever be enough. It’s like a trickle on a parched throat. A lone firefly flickering in immense, implacable dark. Betsy says, I think we’re worried for nothing, Amanda. Really. I tend to agree, Amanda sighs. But for God’s sake keep us all in the loop. They unfold themselves from the chairs, which have stamped angry red lines on their calves. Austin struggles to carry all four but nobody helps. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, hisses a voice in his head. What is that from? Macbeth? The voice tells the truth. Tomorrows will keep coming and he has no idea how to get through the rest of his life. Jen and Amanda drift towards the El and Betsy drives off in her rusted hatchback. If there is a God, he thinks, maybe he’s forgotten about us. Maybe we’re free and we just don’t know it. Betsy takes the Red Line back to her building. It’s an old coffee factory chopped into trendy lofts. She feeds the cat, waters her forty-three ferns. One day at Target she saw one so meager and bedraggled she couldn’t help but bring it home. Now she can’t stop buying them. They’re everywhere, unfurling from bookshelves, covering her desk, infusing the air with a tranquil, greenish light. She doesn’t speak to her family but the ferns curl so delicately that she thinks they might, in some strange, secret consciousness, know and love her. She brews a pot of tea, dumps it down the sink, makes a screwdriver instead. She downs it, then another, until warmth spreads beneath her lungs, softening memory’s vicious edges. She didn’t even scream, she thinks, and this is all she ever thinks, this thing that isn’t a fact, that reverberates its nothingness no matter how hard she tries to banish it. Amanda takes the Blue Line to work. She’s a nurse in a pediatric oncology ward. All night she’ll hold tiny, fragile hands, promise children they won’t die. And when they do die she’ll forget the promises because that’s the only way she can string the moments together in some semblance of a life. Doctors rush through hallways and family members drift in and out of rooms, looking haunted, sometimes furious. A boy with lymphoma asks her if God plays poker, because his daddy says life’s like you get two pair but the angels always have flushes. She kisses him on the forehead and tells him to get back to his Harry Potter book. Her next stop is Lisa, a five-year-old with leukemia. The mother, a fat woman with a greasy puff of bleached hair, flips through People. Did you know, says the woman, that Tom Cruise believes in aliens? I guess I did. He’s a Scientologist, right? And these are the motherfuckers who get to be millionaires. Meanwhile we’re two hundred grand in the hole from treatment with no end in sight. Amanda tells her we can’t explain, only accept, then slips down a deserted hallway into the dispensary. Seeing them all today, dredging it all up, birthed an edgy hunger in her stomach. She pilfers four eighty-milligram Oxys from a jar, chews one, waits for the release, which comes as always, like falling asleep in a hammock, knowing that someone who loved you would protect you from anything, no matter how terrifying. The rest of her shift passes in a happy blur. There is only one bad moment, when she looks out a window and sees the moon, heavy, accusatory, and the stars that glitter like eyes that see the truth. I won’t be this way, she whispers to herself, I didn’t hate her, I wasn’t afraid of her, it had to be done. The moon doesn’t answer and she turns away, her heart irrevocably fractured. Austin sits in his dingy Lakeview studio, painting. What he’s painting hasn’t revealed itself to him. All he has is a chaos of slashes, insubstantial triangles, a blurry foundation that could be sea, could be grass, or could be the first level of Hell. He mixes white and yellow, adds sunlight to the edges of things. It doesn’t help and he doesn’t have any more ideas. He cleans his hands, changes into jeans and an Arcade Fire t-shirt, tries to read but ends up staring at the dance of dust motes in the afternoon sunlight, listening to the city roar beneath his window. If she’s here she’s everywhere, and he whispers, we all loved you, we loved you enough to do it, so why won’t you let me forget? He gets no answer but the ticking of a clock and an ant that bumbles up to his shoe and struggles pointlessly against its immensity. It’s everywhere, Shannon had said. What is? What are you talking about, baby? It started out as cervical cancer but now it’s liver and stomach, even bones. Can I have another gin and tonic? But you’re driving. Jesus Austin, don’t go all holy and responsible on me now. Get me a drink. He did. She sat on the edge of his bed and explained. At first he wouldn’t believe it. But she seemed to take his acquiescence for granted. How quickly she got to the details, the logistics. It will take more than one person, she’d said, so you all have to be on board. It will take about ten minutes, I think. Bewildered, he’d tangled his fingers through hers and said, no, no, but it wasn’t any use. Later that week they sat in Jen’s parents’ garage toking on a half-inch blunt, sputtering protests. Betsy even cried. Ugly crying, red-faced, nose running. But Shannon wasn’t their friend anymore. She was something eerie and vast. A seagull, a horned owl, a quiet corona of starlight. After night fell and they were stoned enough to do it but not enough to fall or make mistakes, they piled into the Mercedes and drove out of the suburbs onto 290, so ordinary after the charged shadows of the garage. When they reached the edge of the city the bridge was up and Austin was relieved. We won’t get through, he thought, and she’ll reconsider, but then the great metal wings began to descend and the bridge reconstituted itself and Jen drove across. Shannon kissed their cheeks and said thank you. Her body in the dark, rippling waters was white, incandescent. When it was over they tied rocks to her wrists and ankles. And that should have been the end but it was only the beginning. Two weeks pass and they relax. Amanda tells a pirate joke. Betsy posts pictures of plants on instagram. Then there is a knock on Austin’s door. When he opens it he sees two men in wrinkled suits. One has pale eyes and a wispy beard. The other wears a wedding ring. They introduce himself and he clears newspapers off the couch so they’ll have a place to sit. I’m sure you’ve heard by now that Shannon’s case has been reopened, says the one called Surrey. Oh. Would you like some coffee? Nah. Too late in the day. Anyhow, you dated her, correct? At the time of her disappearance? Yes. Casual thing? Just a romp in the sheets? Something like a tense, shivering wire breaks in Austin’s stomach. He starts to cry. It goes on and on. He realizes he can walk the road he’s carved out for himself but there will always be boulders to stumble over, a shimmery, relentless heat, a chaotic emptiness to the air. One of the men hands him a handkerchief. It’s very clean. He wipes his eyes and his nose. Then he begins to tell his story.