It was cold enough to snow, but any that fell turned into rain after an hour and left sludgy gray matter dripping from the eaves of storefronts and newspaper stands, or fanned shins and ankles from the spinning wheels of passing cars.  Vicky had gained some weight, too, in spite of her ceaseless hunger.  Not much.  Five pounds?  Seven?  She ate sparsely, only what she could afford—shriveled apples from the corner grocer, tomato soup, tuna fish.  Yet her skin was the flabby consistency of pudding, her curls flaccid and heavy.  Outside, the streets smelled of salt water and butchered fish.

When it wasn’t raining, the air was thick with fog.  It pulled at her hair with fibrous teeth.  It sulked like so many sad and heavy ghosts at windows.  It made seeing difficult.

She missed Arizona.  It had been eight years—almost a decade—and she couldn’t remember the last time she had so much as visited.  Reasons for which she had left pulled at her now with stubborn insistence.  She was twenty-six and a mess, a sentimental mess.  It was this goddamn weather, she thought.  Memories stirred and pooled like mud in the leafy brown yards.  Her mother and all those stepfathers.  Her pink stuffed elephant, Winchester, and the pet parakeet she had killed when she placed its cage to close to the radiator (beak welded grimly shut, feathers brittle).  Darting lizards and a hot blue sky and dry air and the red clay she had scooped into a jar for her fourth-grade science project and everything, everything she did not have now, so long gone from that place.  Even her father got swept up in all this.  Her father, ha!  How can you miss someone who was never there in the first place?

She wanted to tell these things to her mother, to admit to feeling down.  To longing for whatever it was she had left behind.  She didn’t know what she had left behind, but she wanted to speculate.  Instead, she lied.  First about Hudson, and then about everything.  She lied and lied and lied.  Some lies unfolded freely and voluminously.  Others dropped from her lips like heavy stones.  When the wispy blonde man at the corner mart asked if she had a boyfriend, she looked at him gravely and told him about her fiancé’s chemotherapy treatments, that they weren’t going well and that all this tuna was for him.  “It reminds him of his childhood,” she explained.

What had Hudson done to her?  She couldn’t remember feeling so unhinged in Colorado, or California, or Texas, or anywhere.  Sure, she’d never been all that happy, but she was at least independent.  She was. 

Her best lies were those she told her mother.  Vicky could hear her breathing with staticy rapt attention on the other end of the line.  Beyond that was the murmur of the television, or Roy humming tunelessly.  Probably arranging roses or tiger lilies in vases.

She had witnessed a sudden, passionate kiss between strangers on the bus, she said, and all had applauded.  Hudson won two-hundred dollars on a lottery ticket and they had shared a six-course meal at a restaurant overlooking the harbor—they both had agreed the key lime pie was Good But Not Great.  She described their extremely tidy apartment.  They altered vacuuming duties, they stuck to a schedule and Vicky felt freer for it.  She had taken a whale watching tour one afternoon, she said, while Hudson worked.  Hair slapped at her wind-bitten cheeks.  A pod of Orca whales tumbled along starboard side of the small cruiser.  They were enormous, with oily black fins and ice-white ovals near their eyes.  The tour guide dropped microphones into the depths of the sea and listened to the creatures speak whale.  “Listen to them yearn,” the guide had told them, looking suddenly teary-eyed.  “Isn’t that fantastical?  Isn’t that heartbreaking?”  So they leaned anxiously forward to hear the whales yearn.  They yearned and yearned, their voices like creaking wood.

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