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by it. Later, I realized the mortification would kill me if I didn’t change my attitude and so I began to imagine my dad as the noble captain of a sinking ship. Or, sometimes, as a faithful lover, waiting for a passionately planned rendezvous that would never happen.
    I conjured up all sorts of reasons for him to be there every Sunday other than the real one, which seemed to be that it fulfilled a need to be reminded of his powerlessness, over and over and over again.
    Americans who come into our real town are either surprised or disappointed or both. They see some of us sitting on the curb smoking Sweet Caps, wearing tube tops, and they don’t like it. They pay good money to see bonnets and aprons and horse-drawn wagons.
    A tourist once came up to me and took a picture and said to her husband, now here’s a priceless juxtaposition of old and new. They debated the idea of giving me some money, then concluded: no.
    I speak English, I said. The artificial village and the chicken evisceration plant a few miles down the road are our main industries. On hot nights when the wind is right, the smell of blood and feathers tucks us in like an evil parent. There are no bars or visible exits.
     
    But I suppose there are ways to leave if you know the terrain. My mom and my sister easily made tracks when it was time tosplit. (Mr. Quiring has advised me to “lay off the jive talk.” It just happens sometimes. I can’t control it. I’m Sybil. I used to do it to entertain my mom and my sister, calling them child and talking about the pusher man and all that stuff, you know, funkifying—to make them laugh. I was just a kid imitating Tash’s records. So now, when I talk about them, I sometimes become Curtis Mayfield. I don’t really know why it happens. I’ll try to curb it.)
    My mother, Trudie Dora Nickel née Rosenfeldt, has gone away. Irrefutable fact, although where she is is up to me, right? I mean I don’t know but who cares—that’s not how stories work around here. Every day at Happy Family Farms a few birds somehow manage to escape and fly away. Some of them end up dead in the ditches.
    Like I said, I don’t know where she is, but I imagine different scenarios. The scenarios that I imagine most often involve my mother, with passport in hand, travelling around the world. That’s why I was so profoundly disappointed to find her passport in her top drawer. That discovery posed the hateful question of where she might be if not somewhere in the world.
    I use drugs and my imagination to block that question.
    She left seven weeks after my sister, Natasha Dawn Nickel, left with Ian, Mr. Quiring’s nephew. Different people have different theories but they don’t talk about them as a rule. I believe that they’re all alive and that one day we will be together except possibly without Ian. Tash and Ian may be rearing their own love child somewhere in northern California right now. I could be the aunt of somebody named Tolerance. My mother might be an activity director on a cruise ship. She likes water and she likes activities. She’s a Cancer. Did she pack warm clothes for herself when she left? No, she did not. Did she pack any clothes for herself when she left? No, she did not.A detail that falls into the same disturbing category as the one about her passport still being in her dresser drawer.
    I’m only mentioning these things because they weigh on me. Not because I let them control my life. Or this story. Who cares about facts, right? We’re talking about miracles. Jesus died on a cross to save our sins and three days later he rose up from the grave and pushed a giant boulder away from the opening of the cave they’d put him in. Good enough.

 
    eight
    I like to ride my bike to the border and stare at America. I like to ride my bike to train crossings in empty fields and watch graffiti fly past me at a hundred miles an hour. It really is the perfect way to view art. I silently thank the disenfranchised kids from