When you turn ten, you move with your mother to a giant house in Sea Cliff owned by a musician. The pale stucco of the house looks built from shells. From every back window, you can see the orange of the bridge when the fog blows sideways. Glass beads in strings hang from doorknobs so that each opening and closing of a door sounds like animal teeth in an open hand.
 
You've lived so many places with your mother: Echo Park with a painter, Topanga with an actor, Arcata with a dealer. Six months in some man's house and then out and on someone's pull-out couch or sometimes balled up in the car where you wake hungry to ravens making a cackle of the morning.
 
It's a time with so many missing children, or at least it feels that way. When you see them on milk cartons, you envy them. You ignore the fact that the takers of these children might be violent, might do gruesome things that people will whisper about or be unwilling to speak about at all. Instead, you envision these kids in the backs of cars holding their breath a little while speeding to some better version of things.
 
No matter how cold it is in the morning, the musician turns up Herbie Hancock and sits on the patio behind the pink house smoking. He ignores you. He doesn't touch you, which is good and in some houses has not been the case.
 
The rhododendrons that cape the patio are sprouted claws in the nighttime when, sleepless at 4 or 5 a.m., you walk the dark path that winds down to the water. The musician and your mother never miss you. They don't even know you're gone. Homeless men sleep in the tree roots like a cemetery spilling over after an earthquake, their bodies completely still and with no capacity to harm.
 
For nearly a year, you live in that house, for so long that when you walk the path back to the house in the early mornings and hear Herbie Hancock, you let yourself think: home, you are almost home.
 
Your mother's suitcase is a flowered rolling bag stolen from a shop on Valencia. It should be no surprise to come upon her leaving. The gray trees that line the street in front of the house twist around themselves and cast human shadows. The pink of the house looks like flesh pre-dawn, like a breathing thing you are choosing to turn from. 
 
Without noise, you follow your mother to the car. There's the clicking of a stoplight timing itself toward green somewhere, and you try to walk like your feet are tissue. You've learned to leave places quietly. Though it will take years to know it, this is a skill that will serve you your whole life: being there but not, being solid but formless. Your mother puts the car into gear, and it rolls forward. The night is all fog, and you are ghosts again.

Amy Stuber lives in the Midwest. She has work in or coming from Ploughshares, Split Lip, New England Review, Hobart, American Short Fiction and others.

Read her postcard.

Detail of photo on main page courtesy of sswj.

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