59.

She heard it as soon as she stepped out of the fifth-floor stairwell: the lovely, aching song of Audrey trying to fill herself.

McKenna thanked the foreman, a white-haired, stocky guy named Merle, whose moustache might have been pilfered from Mark Twain’s lip. He told McKenna to be careful. “Sometimes she doesn’t look where she’s eating. And she moves pretty quick. I’ll be right here if you need me.”

McKenna walked down the hallway toward Rooms 501—520.

“Hey!” Merle called. McKenna turned around. “Tell her she don’t have to finish the whole city if she don’t want to.” He tried to grin. “If she don’t want to, that’s all.”

McKenna rounded a corner. The sounds of crunching fell silent.

She stopped in her tracks. She couldn’t grasp what she was seeing. On her left side, it looked like any hotel—a row of numbered doors.

On her right was a surreal scene. McKenna stood facing a bizarre diorama—a string of ten hotel rooms and bathrooms stretching for two hundred feet. No walls anywhere, except the exterior wall. It looked like a department store display. Everything in its place. Beds made. Television cabinets closed. Writing desks clear of clutter. Wastebaskets empty. Shower curtains draped regally over tubs. Freestanding toilets and sinks. A doll house. Everything peaceful beneath a snowy blanket of dust.

The curtains were drawn, but sunlight poured in. A humid breeze touched the top of McKenna’s head. She looked up. The ceiling was gone. Mist enchanted the air, an ethereal glow.

Maybe this is Heaven. Couldn’t I make it so? Climb into one of those beds? Sleep here forever.

“You look like I feel,” a voice said.

McKenna stepped into one of the “rooms.” She squinted through the toxic fog, grateful for the filter over her mouth. On a queen-sized bed, Audrey reposed.

She hadn’t bothered to clear the drywall and sawdust before lying down. She didn’t wear a mask. She watched McKenna approach. Her lips pulled histrionically at a cigarette. She blew a column of smoke toward the sky.

“That’s always been your problem,” McKenna said. “If you felt how you look, you wouldn’t be eating a city.”

Audrey considered this. She shrugged. McKenna dragged a chair from the writing desk and sat beside the bed.

Audrey scooted herself into a seated position against the headboard, grunting as if making a great effort. She was dressed in a brown WMU sweat suit. Her expensive feet were nowhere to be seen. Not even her padded socks. Just bare, exposed stumps. Didn’t they get cut by glass, splintered by wood? Where were her crutches? Did she crawl around the floor and eat things? Like she’d done with McKenna when she was a baby?

Maybe this was what Audrey longed for, a return to the days with McKenna, days of joy and crayons. It was a pleasant idea, and McKenna held onto it.

“You’re the first one to visit me,” Audrey said.

“Johann says he tried a few times.”

“Oh, him. He tried. He failed.”

“I thought you were in love with him.”

“Who said I wasn’t?”

“Are you? ”

“Is there a rule that says people you love should get better treatment than everyone else?”

“I thought so.”

Audrey shrugged. “News to me.” She took a drag. The ember sizzled a stray hair. She flicked her cigarette into the bathtub ten feet away. “Two points!”

McKenna waited.

“Look, we had no future. I cut him off a long time ago. End of story.”

(It’s a lie, but did McKenna know it at this moment? Or was it only years later, from reading books, when she learned that Audrey couldn’t bear Johann a child, so he’d sent her packing? Sent her back to Michigan, back to her destiny.)

Here comes that Hershey bar again.

“Chet wanted me to tell you ‘Hi.’ ”

With her fingers, Audrey flung the hair off her shoulders, did a head shake. A familiar move, whenever boys were mentioned. “Really? He’s sweet.”

“He’s got a kid.”

“Why are you here, exactly?” She rolled off the bed on the opposite side from McKenna. She came up with crutches under her arms. She looked gaunt and hollow-eyed. Her hands were skeletal, the skin papery and transparent.

“You don’t have to keep doing this,” McKenna said. “Some people don’t want you to—”

“Oh, let me guess. You’re here to boss me around. Because you don’t have a goddamned life of your own.”

“Come home! Or go somewhere! Do something.”

She blinked. “You really are saying this? You ?!”

McKenna stood from the chair. Audrey crutched to the bathtub. She leaned over and with a primal scream rent an enormous chunk of porcelain with her teeth. McKenna plugged her ears. Audrey took another bite, and another, and another. It was quick and brutal, her head whipping back and forth, a bedlam of obliteration mixed with the wails of a dying animal.

Fifteen seconds later, the tub was gone. Audrey sat on the floor and quietly slurped the shower curtain into her mouth, followed by a handful of plastic rings, which she ate like donuts while speaking.

“They wanted me, Kenny,” she said, chewing. She stood with difficulty. “I know you don’t like to hear it, but it’s the truth. I know most of my family hated me for being what I am. Hid me away, treated me like a disease. Listen, Kalamazoo needed me. This was their idea. They made the rules. They can’t just stop now and say good-bye. They can’t just be tired of me. That’s not how it works. I won’t allow it. I WON’T ALLOW IT!”

McKenna startled. Audrey burst into that same aggressive guffaw she’d used on Grandma Pencil, but this time, her voice was wheezy and thin. She stopped. Her breathing was labored. She rested on her crutches, her eyes closed.

“I’m sorry I punched you,” McKenna said.

Audrey didn’t open her eyes. She swayed in place, her stumps padding on the floor in a delicate dance, her head bowed. She wanted to melt, dissolve into this nightmare domestic space she’d created. At last, she whispered, “I forgot all about that.”

The Hershey’s slid back and forth along the inside of McKen-na’s throat.

Audrey opened her eyes. “Did you apologize to Grandma?”

McKenna made a smiley face in the dust with the toe of her shoe.

“Of course not,” Audrey said. “You and those pigtails. Still a child.”

“Grandma’s sick, if you want to know. She’s in the hospital.”

“Oh.” She raised her left leg, picked a couple chunks of porcelain off her stump and ate them.

“She had a stroke.”

“Oh.”

“And by the way, she took back what she said.”

“Took what back?”

“That thing she said about Mom.”

Audrey gave her sister a hard sidelong stare. “Bullshit.”

“Honest. That’s why I came to see you. She said there’s no passage in the Bible that calls suicide a sin. Nothing explicit, anyway. I worked on her. Maybe it’s because . . .” McKenna paused, feeling the Hershey bar drift back down, the final time. “Anyway, I thought you should know.”

Audrey wiped her mouth. Blinked. Her eyes were watery and red from the dust. “Well. I guess our plan worked, then.” She coughed wetly. “I’m glad you told me.”

McKenna felt the urge to step in closer, perhaps touch her sister on the shoulder, but she couldn’t be sure of the outcome. “Remember how I used to feed you?”

The sun climbed from behind a cloud and brightened Audrey’s hair. Sounds of machinery, of repair, rumbled beneath Audrey’s voice: “I don’t remember.”

“You weren’t even a toddler yet. I smuggled crayons, soap, whatever you wanted. I can still see your face, so happy.” McKenna felt a rising sensation inside her, as if her blood were being drawn toward the sky. “And now I’m here. When nobody else is.”

Audrey’s jaw tightened. She pursed her lips. She seemed to be fighting to keep the words in her throat from escaping her mouth. When she looked up at McKenna, her eyes appeared scarred by the glaring sunlight. She nodded as if they’d come to a mutual agreement about something.

Then she brought a cigarette out of the pack and lit it. “I’m still going to finish eating.”

“Of course.”

“These people love me,” she puffed. “They do.”

“Of course. We all love you.”