Girl in Landscape by Jonathan Lethem

agilely as the others.
    Then she separated from the other three. They darted around the other side of the counter, to spy on Efram and Wa as they resumed their conversation, while Pella made a dash for the door. She slipped past Doug Grant’s feet at the doorway, and ran across the porch.
    Then out, into the valley, to find her other, more usual self.
    “Hey, Pella.”
    It was Bruce. Pella sat up. She was sitting in a tangle of vines on a flat rock in the bright sun. Bruce and Raymond stood over her. David and Martha were a little farther off.
    “What happened to your leg?”
    “Nothing.” Oozing blood had circled her ankle, then dried. She rubbed at the crusted stripe with her thumb. “I stepped on a potato hole.”
    “So why were you lying there like that?” said Raymond. He sounded more resentful than concerned.
    Pella didn’t exactly have an answer. “I was just lying down for a minute,” she said. She recalled her fugue, her visit to Wa’s store. Her dash back across the valley. No, she didn’t exactly have an answer.
    “Looked dead,” said Raymond, turning away disgusted, as if Pella had failed in some responsibility to him and David, some promise that she wouldn’t ever look dead.
    Pella felt that in some way she
had
failed. She got up, dusted herself off.
    Martha stood sipping from a plastic bottle. David stood beside her, watching Pella, attentive, his hands a little out from his sides. The way Pella imagined he had watched Caitlin lying helpless in her shower.
    “Anybody down there?” she asked Bruce.
    “Nope,” said Bruce. “Efram must be out somewhere. Maybe he’s up at Wa’s. We got Martha something out of his fridge anyway.”
    Pella didn’t say a word, just trudged back with them.

Eight
    “Invite Diana Eastling over for dinner tonight.”
    Pella had located Clement out behind the house. He was tamping soil from a bag into a trench in the ground. She limped up, her ankle a bit weak after all. Raymond and David were playing inside the house. Bruce and Martha had wandered home.
    Clement looked up at her, a smudge of soil across the top of his nose. He pursed his lips. “That’s a pretty specific request,” he said. “What if she’s busy?”
    “Try.”
    “May I ask what this is about?”
    “Maybe she knows about the Archbuilder viruses, about what they do to people.”
    Now Clement looked concerned. Pella felt only annoyance. She wanted to bypass his useless, uninformed attention. “Is there something I should know about?” he asked. “Are you … already experiencing something unusual?”
    “No,” she said, certain she was lying, certain she wanted to be.
    “So what’s the sudden urgent need for information?” He grinned and shrugged at her, rubbing dirt off his hands.
    “Don’t you think—” She knew she was being impossible, unfair. She wanted him to help her without fathering her, without arousing those instincts. Still, she persisted. “Shouldn’t we find out more about it,
before
something happens?”
    “If you feel that way, that’s reason enough.” He’d caught her tone now. “I don’t know Diana that well, Pella, but we can ask. Do you really want to talk with the boys there?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “They’re liable to ask a lot of silly questions.”
    “I guess.” She was surprised. Clement would treat her like an equal if she insisted. If that was what she wanted.
    A good question.
    “We’ll go ourselves,” said Clement. “Find out what there is to know. Then you and me can translate for the boys later.”
    After dinner they set out into the north of the valley as the sun went down. The fragmented arches were all black silhouettes, against a sky still pink and peach beyond the ruins. It felt wrong walking alone with her father. Pella could think of only two or three times before,in the days leading up to Caitlin’s death. In hospital corridors.
    Diana Eastling’s house was lit, visible from a distance. They approached in silence,