You Remind Me of Me by Dan Chaon Read Free Book Online

were a picture, its caption would be:
Dread.
Its caption would be:
The undead stream forth in an endless torrent from the mouth of hell.
    ——
    She covers her mouth at the thought but doesn’t laugh. She focuses instead on the steady crunch of Dominique’s feet against the gravel, the girl’s solemn, gracefully bovine trudge. She focuses on the clot of houses at the bottom of the hill, the tender, dirty nub of a prairie town, with its ice cream parlor and its movie house and its little post office and bank and gas station. There is a satisfaction in knowing that such places are dying their wretched deaths, in knowing that such towns are stumbling, wounded, their young people flowing out and away once they leave high school, draining out of the town like blood. Stupid people, she thinks. What kind of an idiot tries to build a town in the middle of the sandhills, a grassy desert where only sod will grow? These are the same people who would be pleased to act as if the fake rings make some sort of difference, the sort of people who will stare out their windows, deeply content, as the girls drift into their streets. After a moment, Nora slips the tin ring off her finger and lets it fall to the ground. She can imagine a soft “ping” as it hits the gravel driveway. She can picture it rolling down some groove in the ditch, through the dry weeds and mud, off toward some adventure. She thinks of the gingerbread man in the fairy tale.
Run, run, as fast as you can, you can’t catch me, I’m the Gingerbread Man.
    ——
    If she lives long enough her life will have a story, and the story will begin at this moment. Once upon a time, there was a girl who didn’t want to have a baby, but she did. Once upon a time, there was a baby who lived in the body of a girl, and there was nothing that she could do about it. Once upon a time, there was a girl who thought her life would be different.

4
    June 4, 1997
    A child disappears from his grandmother’s backyard on a morning in late spring. He is there one minute—the grandmother glances out the window while she is washing the dishes and she sees him standing by the cyclone fence near the copse of lilac bushes, his hands clasped behind his back, talking to himself, as he likes to do.
    And then he is gone.
    It is a morning in early June, tranquil and warm, and the town of St. Bonaventure, Nebraska, has reached its greenest moment. By July the prairies that surround the town’s clutch of houses and trees will have faded to a grayish-tan, the color of lichen, and even the fields of corn and alfalfa will seem artificial, desperately verdant beneath huge, insectlike irrigation systems that stride over the fields on long metal legs. Dust devils as high as churches will rise up in the stubble fields and churn their way across the roads and highways, right into the walking sprinklers as if attacking. Dust will settle on the crops’ damp leaves.
    But this particular morning the hot, dry, rainless days still seem far away. It is truly, purely spring. School is out. Children play in yards and ride bikes on the sidewalks. Discount City has set up rows of bright pink and blue kiddie pools, in three sizes, along its outside wall. Farmer’s Co-op displays planters full of seedlings—tomato plants and jalapeño peppers and watermelon vines and garden flowers—spreading them out on folding tables in the sun.
    On such a day the grandmother is not particularly concerned that she doesn’t see the child when she looks out the kitchen window. He’s playing, she thinks. The boy, Loomis, is six years old, and in fact is a kind of miracle of restraint and politeness for a child of the late twentieth century. He’s the type of child who still consistently presents himself to her to ask, “Grandma, may I use the rest room?” and who will pause to take note of the time on the plastic wristwatch his father has given him because he likes to be in bed at exactly eight-thirty. When she looks out again and