The Year of the Gadfly by Jennifer Miller Page A

scrolled through the address book, mumbling names to herself. And then she stopped. “Dalia Zalowski.” She looked up at me. “Oh, Iris . . .”
    I looked away.
    â€œI thought we talked about this, sweetie. Remember what Dr. Patrick said. You need to erase it.”
    â€œGive it back!” I reached out my arm. Tears had begun to drip from my eyes and sink into Lily’s pink comforter.
    â€œIris, are you listening to me?”
    I looked up as if I hadn’t actually heard. But I had. The black bird I’d felt inside my chest earlier that day began rustling its wings. I shook my head, crying. It wasn’t my fault that I didn’t have anyone to call, that Dalia’s phone was disconnected and put in some box in her room with everything else she wasn’t ever going to need again. Dalia’s number was the only thing I had from my old life. I’d already given up the main thing—the thing that mattered—so why couldn’t I just keep the number?
    Frantic, I lunged for the phone and grabbed it, and before I knew what I was doing, the phone was hurtling toward the wall. It smashed and clattered to the floor. My mother looked like she’d just witnessed a car crash.
    â€œI don’t know what to do, Iris.” She was crying now. “I’m trying to help you.”
    â€œI don’t want your help,” I yelled. “I want you to leave me alone!”
    My father appeared in the doorway. He looked from my mother, balanced on the corner of the bed, to me, curled up against the headboard. When he noticed the phone, he gave me an exhausted look. He walked over to the bed and helped my mother up. “I’m trying to help her,” she sobbed into my father’s armpit. “Nothing’s working.”
    When they were gone, I felt a strange sense of calm, like my brain was an empty shell. On the floor across the room, the phone’s cracked screen glowed white. I turned around to see Murrow’s picture on the wall. He’d lost people, too. Jan Masaryk, George Polk, and worst of all Laurence Duggan, who’d been Murrow’s first real friend in New York City. The government went after Duggan, accusing him of spying for Russia. Duggan couldn’t take the intimidation, so he jumped out the window of his Manhattan office. He fell sixteen stories and landed on the sidewalk. The impact knocked off one of his shoes.
    The night after Duggan’s death, Murrow went on the air and told the nation about the injustice that had killed his friend. He talked and people listened. But nobody was listening to me. “You had a whole country of people who cared what you thought!” I shouted at Murrow’s poster. “But I don’t have anyone. Not one! Just like my mother said. So what am I supposed to do?” I waited, heaving. “Answer me!” But the room was silent.
    Like Duggan, Dalia had ripped herself out of the world. The cut was sudden and messy, and she’d taken part of me with her. This hole, I realized, had filled up with shadows, with dark, beating wings. I climbed under Lily’s covers and curled up with
Marvelous Species.
Somewhere inside, I reasoned, there must be a creature as misunderstood as I was.

Jonah
October 2012
    IN NYE ALL climatory bets are off, so I wasn’t surprised to wake up one day in early October and discover a hefty fall of snow. It was the kind of morning that made you want a woman in your bed, another sleep-warmed body to pull close for just five more minutes. Of late, I’d taken to reminding myself that over 450 species of bdelloids in swampy waters and damp mosses never had sex and didn’t seem to mind. My six months of celibacy was nothing extraordinary. But comparing myself to leechlike creatures wasn’t exactly a mood booster.
    Even worse, I knew exactly who I wanted in my bed. I’d been in Nye for two months and still had no sighting of Hazel Greenburg, the