Getting Somewhere by Beth Neff Page A

she can hardly feel them. She stares at the mottled red skin as if trying to remember where she’s seen those hands before and then tucks them into her armpits, allowing herself a short break to admire the scene in front of her: Jenna and Cassie out in the garden, Ellie a little distance away, their bent backs to Sarah, the greens and golds and browns merging together like the watercolor strokes of some French painting she once spent almost a whole afternoon staring at. Cold hands, just like that day, so cold that her fingers felt frozen solid right through the gloves she’d found, separately, lying on the sidewalk in two different places. The museum day.
    â€œRemember the museum day?” Shannon would say. They’d washed their hands and faces again and again in the hot water in the bathroom, stood in front of the steamed mirrors and made faces at themselves. Shannon had laughed out loud. Sarah will never forget Shannon’s laugh, so deep and rough for such a small body. Then they’d wandered through the galleries, so stoned that Sarah found she could hardly pull herself from one canvas to the next. They’d gotten kicked out, of course, threatened with calling the police and so never dared to go back.
    And here she is again, another day both like that one and not—the confusion of excitement mixed with terror, the sense that the images in front of her are unreal, too good to be true, as if, at any moment she’ll be caught and sent away.
    Here come Lauren and Grace, returning, but Sarah has to turn away, fight the flooding disorientation that paralyzes her, erase that picture of Shannon she thought she’d already banished: all the blood, the misshapen skull, the sirens and cops crawling everywhere afterward, picking people up for questioning and Sarah wondering what she would say, whether she would tell them that she saw him, knew what he looked like, wanting it and running from it at the same time. And now why isn’t Lauren even headed this way? She is walking, instead, to the house, and Grace is staring after her, the crate mounded with green resting on her hip, her head shaking, her mouth forming words that Sarah can’t hear and Lauren is ignoring. Sarah is clutching her chest for breath, her temples thudding, a line of sweat breaking out above her lip, but, even through the swirling trance that threatens to overtake her, Sarah notices that Lauren’s borrowed boots aren’t even wet.
    Grace nearly sweeps past Sarah, slowing to squint at her face. Sarah tries to plant a smile there, to peel her hands away from the side of the tub she’s been gripping to remain upright and casually drop them back into the water where the remaining onions still float. “Cold,” she says, and Grace nods briefly and moves on into the shed to place the crate of cress in the shade until Sarah has finished the onions, drained the tub, and refilled it with fresh water.
    Grace goes out to pick a few more radishes while Sarah washes the cress and hurries to package it so that Grace won’t notice how clumsy she is with the small bags. It would be better if she could keep her thoughts fully at this farm, stop tumbling back into that former life every other second, but her mind refuses to let her. She hears her stomach growling, and suddenly she is back on Western Avenue, hungrier than she has ever been, and so tired, too, ready to crawl into any old doorway and get some sleep.
    She’d left early the previous day, had gotten up for school like always, pretended to eat her breakfast, wishing later she really had. She’d made the decision days, maybe even weeks, before but never could get the gumption to go. Learning her mom had gone to working nights at the hospital full-time had finally clinched it. She couldn’t do it anymore, couldn’t stand the waiting, the dreading, the pure nausea and humiliation when she heard his steps in the hallway, saw the knob turn on the