York

Ruth keeps her eyes on her broken-down Converses as she walks home, trying not to see the syringes underneath the abandoned brick house, trying not to make eye contact with the pimp as he passes her on the sidewalk. He isn't dressed flamboyantly like the pimps in the movies, but like someone's dad, all khakis and concerned looks, glint of an earring in the dying sun. Bluetooth headset. Who does he walk around talking to all day? She sneaks a glance at her reflection in the streaked plate glass alongside her, hoping he's impressed, embarrassed by this thought. He's polite, overly polite, to the residents of New Directions Sober Living Home for Women, and he gives her a nod as if to say, I am the mayor of this neighborhood, and I welcome you. She nods in return. Crossing to the house, Ruth is aware of her staccato footfalls on the ice, their echo against the empty street. The crumbling Victorian greets her mutely, its sagging face yawning toward the snow. She isn't allowed to have a key, so she rings the bell and stares at the flaky skin of white paint on the doorjamb, shooting glances behind her, knowing that he's not powerful until you enter his world. But still.

Carrie at the door, young and hard around the face.

"How do I look?" Ruth forgets to say hello. She is forgetting how to talk to people.

"Kidnappable."

Ruth summons a smile, rusty with disuse. "I think you meant to say 'employable.'"

When she's supposed to be looking for a job, she wanders around the city, aimless, biding her time until Mark lets her come home to LA. There's a used bookstore, a castle of mildew and signs discouraging theft, where she sits for as long as she can stand herself. She can't read anything for very long, can't focus. The version of her who was a reader lived a different life. Still, it's almost a pleasant place to sit, an Adirondack chair in the corner and ten-cent coffee that tastes like old pennies. She goes back and forth between Edith Hamilton's Mythology and an old Louis L'Amour, the wooden cowboys and their problems safely in the past, white cracks veining its pale yellow cover. When she can't sit still, can't fucking sit there for one more moment, she buttons up her coat— wool, camel, purchased for thin LA winters—and skulks out of the store without buying anything, cold hitting her all at once as she opens the heavy glass door.

The downtown library is always her next hideout when she's supposed to be out looking for a job, not allowed back in the house until six, Shelley's imperious rules designed so she can sit in the living room and watch TV all day in peace. The library's stateliness is comforting, with its fluted cornices and winged architrave, the building having long outlived the statement it once made about the city of York, Pennsylvania. She likes to round up all the old New Yorkers with their greasy plastic covers and take a pile of them to the stacks. She has an easier time focusing on magazine articles, but the world inside the covers isn't hers. People who have enough to eat. People who have houses and families and leisure time earmarked for hobbies and friends and art. People brimming with opinions. She spends most of her time in the library staring at the inert black of her phone, hoping Mark will call.

The dim landing of the sober house is packed with surplus furniture and a wall of dusty boxes marked "Amanda's Shit." Ruth follows Carrie up the stairs, staring at the soft stripe of flesh spilling over the back of Carrie's sweatpants like sourdough that needs to be punched back down into the bowl. When they reach the second-floor landing, Ruth is relieved when Carrie keeps walking up the next flight of stairs to her room, glad she gets to be alone in...