Laura van den Berg - Find Me

We drift closer to the island. I see a faraway line of boats. One of them is my mother’s houseboat. She is tucked inside, dry and warm, unable to shake the feeling that something is closing in. She stands up and goes outside. She begins to wait. She feels my energy traveling toward her. This is what I imagine.

Again the sky rumbles. The captain keeps turning the silver wheel.

“Land,” I say to the child.

I see a silhouette on a boat deck, a slight still point in the distance. This I am not imagining. I will the figure to be a woman.

A ship horn bellows. The dark clouds slide over the party boat, satisfied with what they’ve done here, in search of new destruction. The water clears and I see a darting school of fish, a tangerine flicker.

I keep expecting the figure to turn, to vanish, to reveal itself as a figment of the mind, but she stays.

I feel a rage that could sink this boat faster than any storm.

I make the choice and feel the small thing inside go free.

“My name is Joy,” I say, practicing.

The woman is a dark speck at first, an idea of a person, but slowly she takes shape. I can make out the straight line of her legs, the curves of her shoulders. Whoever she turns out to be, I will ask her my questions and see how she answers.

Where will I even start? Here is where I will start.

I will ask her who she is and what she remembers. I will ask her if I seem familiar and how long has she been waiting and did she ever give me a name. I will ask her what she knows about consequences and when she tells me what she thinks she knows I will tell her she has no idea and then I will say, Fuck the guilt, it’s no way to live. Do you know the secrets of your unconscious mind and the parts of yourself you want to kill and bury deep and can I help you with that shovel? Did you really think you could ever bury me? Do you think it is possible to love someone you don’t know and do you think it is possible to love a ghost and are you really missing if there is no one there to look?

I’m here, I will tell her.

Look.

Thank you:

To Ragdale, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Studios of Key West, and Spiro Arts for the time and support.

I’ve worked on this book in a number of different places — North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Baltimore, Utah, Virginia, Illinois, New York City, Boston, Key West — and each landscape made its mark. I’m especially grateful to Key West for the ghosts and the stories.

In the early stages, I consulted Killer Germs by Barry E. Zimmerman and David J. Zimmerman and Flu by Gina Kolata, later turning to sources that shined a light on our current American dystopia — especially Andrea Elliott’s “Invisible Child” series for The New York Times and Matt Taibbi’s “Apocalypse, New Jersey: A Dispatch from America’s Most Desperate Town” for Rolling Stone.

To Mike Y., for letting me crib from his Twitter feed.

To the Writers’ Room of Boston, for the space and the view.

To Courtney and her excellent apartment, where this book was finished.

To the American Academy of Arts and Letters for the extraordinary show of faith.

To Don, Jess, Robin, Tarfia, Karen, Lauren, Ted, Shannon, Porochista, and Jane for the company on the path, which would have been so much darker without you.

To my early readers, Josh, Matt, and James, for helping me find my way through the woods.

To Mike S., Nina, and Meghan for the support and guidance when it was urgently needed.

To Elliott, for writing alongside me.

To Sarah Scire. To Sean McDonald. To Nayon Cho and Abby Kagan. To Delia Casa and Nina Frieman. To everyone else at FSG who helped this book come into being. Thank you.

To Emily Bell, for keeping the path alight with her fierce vision and impeccable editorial eye. For her trust and her friendship. I owe you the world.

To Katherine Fausset, for the exceptional privilege of being able to call you my agent and my friend. You are simply the best. Thank you as well to Stuart Waterman and everyone else at Curtis Brown.

To my family, for believing.

To my grandmother, whom I miss.

To Paul, for everything, always.

Laura van den Berg was raised in Florida. Her first collection of stories, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us , was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection and a finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Her second collection of stories, The Isle of Youth , received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Bard Fiction Prize, and was named a Best Book of 2013 by NPR and The Boston Globe. Find Me is her first novel. She lives in the Boston area. Or sign up for email updates here.