As a child, Beverly visited New York City with her mother, the only trip they would ever take together. Though they were on a tight budget, they visited museums, ate at a fancy restaurant, experienced Times Square, and had pizza and hot dogs from food carts. While Beverly and her mother were at the Observation Deck of the Empire State Building, a man “dressed in a pirate costume” jumped from the platform, and they were almost trampled in the pandemonium (61). Beverly recalls her mother rushing them out.

Beverly wakes up from a dream in which she had been falling. Now a grown woman and mother, she’s in a house she’s rented for herself and her six year-old-son Tommie, having fled from her abusive husband, Gary. Because he works for Homeland Security and has its resources at his disposal, Beverly has left behind her identifying documents and carefully covered her tracks, donning a disguise, training Tommie to behave as if they are not together, and hitching rides to random places to make her trail harder to track. Though she’s been saving for months, she knows that she will need to find a job that will not require identifying documents. She enrolls Tommie in a local school and works on cleaning the rental house, which seems to have been abandoned by its previous residents as if they had fled with as much haste and urgency as she and Tommie had.