Iris lifts one headphone.

Is she hungry?

No, never mind.

She’d rather stay here, with him, than sit at the table with Elena and Geoffrey. Elena doesn’t know why she keeps inviting. Iris is the hunger artist. She hasn’t eaten with them since she disappeared for eight days last July. Not stolen. She ran away. These kids just vanish, the policeman told them. Fall into cracks in the street. He wasn’t trying to be cruel. He said there was a jungle under I-5, tents and shacks hidden in trees, a city beneath the city. You want my advice? he said. Pray.

Elena lights tapers while Geoffrey pops the cork on a bottle of pouilly-fuissé. A boy looking through these windows could mistake them for lovers. They eat cold salmon dipped in hollandaise. Pale green hearts of artichokes. Brilliant raspberries.

So polite, husband and wife, each asking, How was your day? He’s gotten a shipment from Cape Dorset: musk ox and caribou, whales scooped from whalebone, a green owl carved by a blind man who listens to the stones until they speak their shapes. Geoffrey says, A perfect piece — you have to close your eyes to see its wings. But Elena knows it’s old work he loves most, yellowed ivory: a hermaphrodite with walrus tusks, a bear with six legs. The Inuit say, There are things in nature man must not explain. He can’t sell these. They belong in museums. Behind glass. Safe. He stuffs them in socks or rolls them in pillowcases. His rooms are full of strange creatures. Open any box in any closet and you’ll find one, wrapped like a little mummy.

How can Elena judge him? She lives in his house on the hill. Drives his blue Mazda. Drinks his Courvoisier.

There should be bars on these windows. That’s what Iris says. Iris says, You’re a hostage — just like me.

The boy who snatched Elena’s purse is fifty-seven dollars richer tonight and still soaked, still shivering, looking for a place to sleep. But tonight, thanks to Elena, he’s not hungry. He’s gorged himself: three burgers, a chocolate milkshake. He can smoke all he wants, one cigarette after another, no rationing. He has money for a second pack and a third one in the morning. Tonight, Elena thinks, he almost forgives me.

This is the totem pole, Pioneer Square, two days later: raven and otter squat one on top of the other, mindless in the wind and rain.

No wild children here, just trembling men with broken teeth. They have hands like Elena’s father’s. Unsteady. They drink from bottles in paper bags. Leave green glass splintered in the street.

Elena sips cappuccino in a warm Café. Three-dollar cup of foam. That’s what Iris would say. Iris makes her want to leave this place.

Outside, they’re starving.

Outside, the sky’s gone yellow.

Elena leans into the wind because she lacks weight. In every stoop she sees an old man’s face.

Do the men with cracked skin care how she wastes her money? No. Do they sputter or beg? No. They murmur. Three dollars. Nothing.

Then she spots him, the boy again, her little thief. He’s found her already, miles from the Ave., here at the other end of the city.

Not him, but one like him.

Just another boy wearing a hooded sweatshirt under a black jacket.

He crouches in a cul-de-sac. Drenched. He’s been expecting her. He grins. Yes, it’s me, he says. Not out loud. Not in a way that anyone besides Elena hears. Tiny hands slip through her ribcage. Wind blows through her chest.

They hate us.

All these lost kids.

She walks fast. Cars spray water from her ankles to her neck. She catches her own reflection in wavy glass, listens to her own heels click on cement.

At the car, she sees how stupid she’s been. Her door, unlocked. She’s asking for it. Years ago, before Geoff, there were boys in her father’s orchard, brown hands on white wrists. Their tongues in her mouth were the only words they shared.

She married Geoff to stop all that. Her dangerous self-forgetting. Her accidents.

Now that smell is in her car. Smoke and spit, something damp and too familiar, the leaves where she lay down, played dead. She’s afraid to check the back seat or glance in the rearview mirror. If she looks, she thinks she’ll conjure one of them. Fruit picker’s son. Migrant. Her father told her he’d throttle any daughter he caught with one of them. Throttle. When he said the word, his hands in air gripped an imaginary neck.

Elena’s home again. That safe house on the hill.

The boy’s across the water, trapped on the other side of the bridge. No one can touch her. No father will call to curse or raise his fist. She chooses when to go to him. Poor old man, lost in his own front yard. Kind nurses lead him to his door again and again. Where’s Esther? he says. He forgets his wife is dead. Sometimes he calls and calls, then weeps when she won’t answer him. He thinks three nurses who come in shifts are all the same man. They have skin murky as nights in the orchard. You could disappear in them. Daddy’s nurses have big thighs, thick chests. The better to lift you, my dear. Her father’s thin but still heavy. She imagines bowels full of stones, Daddy digging rocks, eating fast. The nurses call him Baby. Cut his meat in tiny bits. Change his soiled pants.

If you wait long enough, everyone you fear will come to this.

Elena stares out the window, watching green clouds scud and swell. Two messages on the machine. Geoffrey says he’s working late. Sorry, sweetheart. Iris says, My ride split. She might be stranded, might sleep in a shelter on the Ave. This is as kind as Iris gets. She means, Don’t worry. I’m not down in the jungle yet.

Waves of rain break hard on glass. Elena runs from room to room, popping lights, rolling towels along the sills, but the rain has no heart, no shape it has to keep, no head — the rain flows through every crack. She wants Iris to call again. Please come. She’d go anywhere. Yes, even in this. When the phone rings at last, it’s only Geoff. He can’t get home. Pileup on the bridge. He’ll have to sleep at the office. He says, I’ll call you back.

But this never happens.

An hour later the whole hill goes dark; the phone goes dead.

Now it’s Elena and the storm. The two of them. She torches last night’s candles. Shadows jump against the walls. Elena’s jittery hand. Elena’s own head. She hasn’t eaten all day. She could make hot chocolate. The stove’s gas. She pours two shots of Chivas in her mug instead.

Windows flex and clatter. The house throbs with her body: she’s the pounding heart in it. Shrubs scritch and slap. Limbs snap. Limbs tear. She thinks of the men from the square, wonders if they crawled into dumpsters and closed the lids.

Somewhere a door slams. Iris blown home? This is Elena’s prayer. In the kitchen, the back screen flaps. When she tries to latch it, a gust rips it from her hands. Hinges shear. Pellets hit her face, icy rain, tiny stones tossed by a tiny fist. The boy, she thinks, he’s out there. Voices roar in the whirlwind, all the lost children rising out of mud and grass.

Is she drunk already? Skinny woman, empty stomach — she tells herself that’s all it is.

Another door bangs below her, the one from garage to basement. Please, God, make it Iris. She stands at the top of the stairs and calls. No answer, only that smell of feral cat.

She takes her bottle to the couch, doesn’t bother with the mug. Candles gutter and flare. The animal follows, marks its territory, sprays its scent. She feels it heave in the leather beneath her thighs and back. Someone’s sewn its torn chest. Someone’s filled its belly with blood and gas.

She drifts. Dreams the creature on top of her. Crushing air from her lungs. Pinching veins in her neck. This beast has a thick hide and six hands. He’s heavy as three men. Feathers slap her face. Then it’s only the boy. Small, hard. The one from the Ave. The one from the square. The child. Little fingers too short to grip her neck. But he has his knife. And he’s so fast.