April 2014 

Vera is losing her grip on time. She’s been driving all night, for days even, she can’t say. 

She pulls over onto the shoulder of road next to the creek, her wheels rumbling across a muddy lump of plowed snow as she comes to a stop. What sunlight reaches over the mountains feels thin and weak. She gets out of the car, leaves it running, then hurriedly makes her way down the rocky bank to the icy edges of moving water and steps in. 

The current presses against her shins. Her feet go numb almost immediately. It’s shallow, too shallow. She’ll have to lie down to fully submerge herself. Will be able to sit up too easily once her lungs give out. 

“Goddamnit,” she says aloud to no one. 

Wind lashes her hair across her face. She knows there are houses upstream and downstream from here, but at this vantage in the brook all she can see is water, rock, and ridge. It could be a hundred years ago, two hundred. Only the rumble of her Subaru’s engine behind her spoils the effect, her jeans and boots if she looks down, but her eyes are now set on the peaks ahead of her. On the notch between them where the turnoff for The Road begins. 

Vera has broken a lot of promises over the years. She’ll write, she’ll call, she’ll see you Monday. But she’s never broken the promise she, her brother Eli, and Ma made to each other until now. The transgression felt theoretical and distant as she packed up her life once again last week. But standing here today beneath the eerily familiar faces of these mountains, some tendril of feeling is pushing its way up through her exhaustion, and it unsettles her. 

She could turn around right now. She’s expected for her first day of work at Forest Ranger Headquarters tomorrow but she could disappear, it’s something she’s very good at after all. No one will know where to start looking, if they even bother. She’s driven cross-country, the search area will be too large. Besides, no one will be that surprised to hear she’s vanished. There’s always been something strange about Vera, and it only got worse after the incident in the desert. “Poor girl” they’ll say after trading their few and paltry memories of her then immediately get on with what’s left of their short lives. 

Vera takes a pistol out from the waistband of her pants. 

A memory of standing barefoot in this creek with Eli appears like a scrim in front of her vision. The tip of her rod curving with the trout she hooked. Her brother shouting directions excitedly as she struggled to keep her footing. Sun hot, water gushing, the promise of a glistening reward if she could listen to the pull of the line and respond calmly, if she could just be steady and patient. 

It was hardly a mile upstream from here but lifetimes ago.

The sour tang of bile rises in her throat.

This was a mistake, Vera thinks and pulls the safety. There’s a reason they made this promise. There will never be any answers, never be any reprieve. How stupid and naive to return, how horrifically pointless, all of this. All of her life. 

She touches the barrel to her chin, to her temple, back to her chin. She braces herself for the shock of it. She hopes for the thousandth time, millionth time, for some relief. 

“You OK down there?” 

Vera whips around to see a middle-aged woman standing at the top of the creek bank above her. 

“I’m fine!” Vera yelps as she quickly slips the firearm back into her jeans and pulls her sweater over its grip. Her heart spasms in her chest. 

The woman crosses her arms, considers what she’s looking at, what she thinks she saw. 

“Your car is running, I was guessing maybe you had a flat or—oh my god, what’re you doing in the water you’ll freeze to death!” 

“Just scouting some fishing holes, got waterproof boots on,” Vera lies, suddenly very cold and very anxious to be out of the creek and far away from here. The woman looks at her with a certain wariness Vera knows too well, then into the rear window of the parked Subaru. 

“You got a lot of stuff in there,” she says matter-of-factly. She’s wearing a sweatshirt, gray as the scene around them. Her short blond hair stands up with a gust of wind as she peers into Vera’s car. 

“I’m moving,” Vera says, trying the truth this time. It’s the easiest way to keep her story straight. To tell the truth, but as little of it as necessary. 

She should climb out of the stream and talk. But then the woman will see she lied about her boots and she has to be careful, always so careful. 

Vera has grown sloppy recently, careless. There have always been phases, times when her burden has felt heavier, when the tides of her pain have washed higher. But in the past few months it’s become harder to reason with herself. Harder to keep a hold on herself even when she tries. 

What was she thinking climbing down here with her car still running? Taking out her gun? 

“Moving? Ah OK, where to? There’s no cell service out here so don’t even bother with your GPS but you got lucky, I’m the postmaster! Janet.” The woman points a thumb at her chest. “You couldn’t find someone who knows this area better than me if you tried.” 

Vera forces a tight smile. 

She found the place on Airbnb, brand-new listing, no reviews. The address was hidden but she recognized it right away because there in the pictures was the meadow of goldenrod and aster, the small stony creek, the specific humped ridge of the mountain to the south. Her mouth went dry at the shock of seeing it again even through the small square of a computer screen. At least half of the apple trees were gone, and for a moment she feared the house and barn were, too, replaced by this little cottage with its fake wood-paneled walls and brown wall-to-wall carpeting. But in her messages with the owner it became clear that the old white farmhouse still stands. That it’s where the owners live, just out of frame of the photographs. 

Vera is loath to give out her exact address even though she knows that if this town is like every other small town she’s ever lived in, the whole neighborhood will know in a matter of days anyway. 

“It’s a cottage, about a mile down that road up there.”

“Oh, Cate and Brian’s! You must be the new ranger.”

She could still leave. Forget the whole bad idea and just go, gone again. Vera flashes forward in the fantasy and finds herself working as a cleaner at a roadside motel somewhere in Pennsylvania. She knows that life. She’s lived dozens and dozens of them. It could be fine. She could be fine. She could just continue to live cycles of small, modest existences, one after another after another, passing through and through and through. 

But she can’t anymore. 

She takes a deep breath—forget Ma, forget Eli—and tells the postmaster, “Yes, I’m the new ranger. I’m Vera.” The sound of her real name feels foreign in her own mouth, it’s been so long. 

Janet beams, hands on her hips, so pleased to have put the pieces together. She gives Vera directions—half a mile straight ahead, then a left at the flagpole, past the post office and the church, four, five, yes the fifth house down on the right. 

“Thank you, Janet,” Vera says as she begins to make her way care- fully to the edge of the creek, her legs entirely numb now. 

“If you cross a bridge you’ve gone too far,” Janet continues, satisfied to finally be of help to the newcomer. “It’s a beautiful spot, the valley really opens up there.” 

“I know,” she says, the small slip hanging between them. 

Janet doesn’t notice, says she’ll start getting Vera’s P.O. Box ready, does she want a small one? One of the medium-size ones? Does she have mail forwarding already? She should come by once she’s settled and get set up. 

“I will,” Vera tells her, repressing a shiver through another gust of wind. 

“Well, welcome to town, Vera!” Janet says. Then she nods good-bye with a smile and leaves Vera standing in the creek. 

***

Back in the car, heat blasting, Vera’s teeth chatter and she shivers violently but it’s the kind of pain she is well versed at weathering. Vera shifts into drive and moves forward. The mountains loom closer. At the flagpole, she grips the wheel and turns onto The Road. 

It’s like a mirage, actual déjà vu, now and then collapsing on top of each other. 

Here are the same white clapboard houses, the post office, the church. Here is the same roll of mountains behind them. There’s the little parsonage, more weathered white clapboard houses. Everything remarkably well kept. Time has added a few garages, telephone wires, asphalt, and two stripes of yellow down the middle of The Road, but it’s startling, downright amazing how little has changed since Vera was last here. 

Her breath grows shallow through her chattering teeth as she continues to look out her window. 

White hills undulate like waves behind the houses, shaggy snow-crusted pines texturing the vista. Hints of angelic blue glow through the soft patches of gray clouds. It’s not as grand as the Rockies, not as stunningly desolate as the Mojave. It is so modest in comparison to all things west but her eyes are feasting, greedily taking in this familiar landscape. That same tendril of emotion pushes up and reaches, brushing something inside her that speeds her pulse again. 

Vera rounds a gentle bend. The old general store comes into view, empty now from the looks of it, then a stand of trees. 

And suddenly, there it is. 

The house is the same white box. Same porch, too, or “stoop” as they used to call it—not because her family once lived in New York City, but because it’s the old Dutch word for “porch.” The door is different, blue with gridded windows, and there’s an exterior light now that wasn’t there before. But it’s unmistakably the house. 

Her house. 

So pulled by the familiar draw of it, Vera nearly misses the split in the gravel driveway that leads to the little white cottage tucked into the shade of the encroaching pines. She puts on her blinker, for who she doesn’t know, and turns left into this new place. 

The wheels grind on the gravel as she comes to a stop in front of the screen door. She turns off the ignition, then everything is quiet. She can hear a faint ringing in her ears, the sigh of the engine cooling down. She zips up her jacket and gets out of the car. The cold covers her immediately and completely. She breathes it in, the pines and mineral hint of snow. She steps toward the front door, her wet boots crunching noisily in the patches of icy white, a sound she’s almost forgotten after so many years in deserts. 

“Hey there!” someone calls from behind her. Vera turns around. 

“Cate?” she asks, even though she knows from the little bit of googling she did before arriving here that this is definitely Cate Bennington. Tall and sturdy, early thirties. She’s in a thick white sweater and the kind of black leggings that can pass for pants these days. Mass-produced moccasins, a mess of brown hair tied up. A smooth, peaches and cream complexion that was once so hard to attain but can now be easily achieved with makeup. 

Vera herself looks about twenty-six. She’s small, pale, and plain, with unremarkable features and straight brown hair. All in all, unmemorable-looking, which has been a unique blessing for her unique condition. The few people who truly know her, though, could spot her immediately by the way her right front tooth overlaps with the left just a touch, by the way she chews her cheeks when deep in thought and cracks her knuckles when frustrated. How her eyes alight into a particular hazel when excited. How dimmed and dulled they can become. Vera herself rarely looks in the mirror anymore. She knows what she looks like by now all too well. 

“Yes! You’re Vera, right? Let me get my boots one sec, I’ll show you in,” Cate says and disappears into the house before Vera can answer back. 

Vera stamps her feet and rolls her stiff neck. When she sighs a big puff of condensation fills the air in front of her. She looks at her house again and something in her flutters. It’s still here, after all these years. Never once moving as Vera herself has scuttled across the country, this place to that. 

How badly Vera wants to go in. She feels it like an ache in her abdomen. Then again, maybe that’s the cold of her soaked pants, or the fact that she hasn’t eaten in at least forty-eight hours, hasn’t slept in just as long. She can’t untangle any of her senses these days. All of it a heavy fog punctured only occasionally by piercing panic. 

The door to the house moans open in need of a little oil and Cate reappears in large, fur-lined boots but no jacket. 

“I guess you found the place OK? I turned the heat up for you last night—” and on Cate talks. Happy, empty talk of weather and travel and their communication leading up to Vera’s arrival. Cate’s husband, Brian, ran into town, she’s sorry she hadn’t thought to ask Vera if she needed anything, she could probably get a hold of him although service out here is spotty. 

“That’s OK,” Vera says as Cate unlocks the door and holds it open for her. 

They tour the cottage. Living room and kitchen here, bedroom here, bathroom here. Cate’s sorry there’s no dishwasher or washing machine but at least there’s a bathtub. The place is dated—built in the sixties and hardly touched since then—but it’s clean. Vera’s never been one to focus on material comforts. Born first from a need to be frugal and invisible, it’s morphed from a coping mechanism to a point of pride. Unlike the decadence of her brother with the private planes and sea yachts and bags that cost ten, twenty, thirty times more than they should simply because they’ve been stamped with a certain logo. Eli would never live here, but for Vera it will do. Besides, she didn’t choose this place for anything but its location. The cottage, the new job—none of that is what matters to Vera right now. All of it just a means to an end. 

“Your name sounds kinda familiar,” Cate says interrupting her own monologue on frozen pipes and how much woodstove heat dries out her skin. 

“My name?” 

Vera suddenly regrets her rash and sentimental choice to use her real name. It had felt so bold as to feel safe. Like a deer standing still in the wide open, counting on being downwind of its predators. No one who was alive then would be alive now, and her brother would never look for her under their family name. She hasn’t been Vera Van Valkenburgh in a very long time. 

“Yeah, I think—oh crap!” Cate cries. She forgot she has a phone call with a client. Wedding invitations, she explains. She’s a graphic designer. “Give a holler if you need anything!” Then she’s off, closing the cheap door behind her with a hollow slam. 

Vera startles at the sound. Her heart surges into her throat, her limbs flash full with sour adrenaline. 

“Get it together,” she hisses at herself. She runs her hands over her face and can feel they are shaking. 

She needs to get out of these wet clothes. She needs to sleep.

She needs to end this.

It takes Vera two trips to gather all her worldly possessions from the car. She unpacks only what she’ll use tonight, she’ll deal with the rest tomorrow, then she draws a bath. She peels her soaked jeans from her clammy legs. She yanks at her saturated socks. The steam begins to billow and fogs the tiny window that looks into the backyard—apple trees, pines, the mountains, all cast in shadow, now that the sun has finally set on the day. 

Naked, she steps into the tub and sinks down. The heat scorches her but she doesn’t cry out or lift a limb. When the water reaches her chin she turns off the faucet with her foot and the comparative silence is striking. 

Pink and warm, Vera reaches for her razor. She’s never shaved her legs or armpits with any regularity. She has fine, downy hair and a dislike for that kind of modern female grooming. 

Jacob rises, unbidden, to the forefront of her mind. Years and years since she’s allowed herself to think of him. It rushes her—yellow coneflowers in his hands and the musk of sun-warmed hay, the big domed bowl of blue sky they once shared. That laugh. For a moment Vera can feel all the old hope, all her old plans for how things could have maybe, finally been different. It steadies the churn and rock within her now. She thinks she can even taste it, that stubborn will to believe. 

And then the present returns.

No anger, no joy, no sadness, she opens her veins.

Her thoughts loosen and swirl as she listens to the small plops of the leaky spout. She weakens and drifts until finally, she is emptied. She touches the edge of the void—there— 

One brief moment of ecstatic nothingness. 

And then, her mind gains traction, her body burns and tightens as it heals itself. 

Returned, as always, Vera sighs, an exhale of exhaustion. Then she stands and runs the shower as the tub drains red. 

 

© Casey Scieszka 2026.

Narrated by Casey Scieszka.

From the book THE FOUNTAIN by Casey Scieszka Copyright © 2026 by Casey Scieszka.
Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.