CHAPTER 15
1
Leaving Old Essie’s den behind, the fox cut a zigzag path through the surrounding woods, pausing to rest in the damp below an overgrown shed. In his sleep he dreamed that his mother brought him a rat, but it was rotten and poison, and he realized that his mother was sick. Her eyes were red and her mouth hung crooked and her tongue lolled to the ground. That was when he remembered that she was gone, his mother was many seasons gone. He had seen her lie down in tall grass, and the next day, she still lay in the same place, but was no longer his mother.
“There’s poison in the walls,” said the dead rat in his dead mother’s mouth. “She says the earth is made of our bodies. I believe her, and oh, the pain doesn’t end. Even death hurts.”
A cloud of moths descended on the fox’s dead mother and the dead rat.
“Don’t stop, child,” said the mother fox. “You have work.”
The fox jerked up out of his sleep and felt a sharp pain as he struck his shoulder against the edge of something jutting down, a nail or glass or a shard of board. It was early evening.
From close by came a thunderous crash: metal and wood, a gasp of steam, the tearing sound of fire catching. The fox darted from under the overgrown shed, breaking hard for the road. Beyond the road loomed the bigger woods and, he hoped, safer ground.
At the side of the road, a car was buckled against a tree. A woman on fire was dragging a man from the front seat of the car. The man was screaming. The sound the burning woman made was a dog sound. The fox understood what it meant: I will kill you, I will kill you, I will kill you. Tendrils of burning web fluttered away from her body.
Here was a moment of decision. High among the fox’s catalog of personal statutes was Thou Shalt Not Cross the Road in Daylight. There were more cars in the day, and cars could not be intimidated or warned off, let alone defeated. As they zoomed over the pavement, they made a sound, too, and if you listened (a fox should always listen), that sound was words, and the words were I want to kill you, I want to kill you, I want to kill you. The hot and leaking remains of animals that had failed to heed these words had provided the fox with many excellent snacks.
On the other hand, a fox that wanted to survive needed to maintain a fluid approach to danger. He needed to balance the threat of a car that wanted to kill you with a woman cloaked in fire declaring that she was going to kill you.
The fox bolted. As he passed her, the heat of the burning woman was in his fur and in the cut on his back. The burning woman had started to pound the man’s head against the pavement and the roar of her anger grew louder, but it faded as the fox scrambled down the embankment on the opposite side of the road.
In the big woods he slowed his pace. The cut in his lower back made his rear right leg hurt every time he pushed off. It was night. Last year’s leaves crackled under the fox’s pads. He stopped to drink from a stream. Oil swirled in the water, but he was thirsty and had to take what he could get. A hawk perched on a stump by the stream. It picked at the belly of a squirrel.
“Let me have some?” the fox called. “I could be a friend to you.”
“A fox has no friends,” said the hawk.
It was true, but the fox would never admit it. “What liar told you that?”
“You’re bleeding, you know,” the hawk said.
The fox didn’t care for the bird’s chipper tone.
The fox thought it wise to change the subject. “What’s going on? Something has changed. What’s happened to the world?”
“There’s a tree further on. A new tree. A Mother Tree. It appeared at dawn. Very beautiful. Very tall. I tried to fly to the top, but although I could see the crown, it was beyond my wings.” A bright red knot of intestine snapped free of the squirrel’s body and the hawk gulped it down.
The hawk tilted its head. A second later a smell twitched the fox’s nostrils: smoke. It had been a dry season. If the burning woman had crossed the road, a few steps into the brush would have been enough to make it all go up.
The fox needed to get moving again. He panted. He was afraid and he was hurt—but he still had his wits.
“Your eyes will make a fine meal for some lucky animal,” the hawk said, and took flight, the limp squirrel locked in its talons.
2
As was hardly uncommon, the First Thursday Book Club had begun to drift away from that month’s text, which happened to be Atonement, by Ian McEwan. The novel’s story followed two lovers, sundered from one another almost before their relationship had begun, by the false accusation of a preternaturally imaginative young girl named Briony.
Dorothy Harper, at seventy-nine the group’s elder stateswoman, said she was unable to forgive Briony for her crime. “That little baggage ruined their lives. Who cares if she was sorry?”
“They say the brain doesn’t fully develop until you’re much older,” said Gail Collins. “Briony was only twelve or thirteen when she told the lie. You can’t blame her.” Gail held her glass of white wine in both hands, cupped around the bowl. She was situated at the nook table by the kitchen bar.
Blanche McIntyre, Warden Coates’s faithful assistant (usually faithful, at least), had met Gail in a secretarial class thirty years earlier. Margaret O’Donnell, the fourth member of the First Thursday Book Club, was Gail’s sister, and the only woman Blanche knew who had a stock portfolio.
“Who says that?” Dorothy asked. “About the brain?”
“Scientists,” Gail said.
“Pish-tush!” Dorothy waved a hand, as if to make a bad smell go away. (Dorothy was the only woman Blanche knew who still said things like pish-tush.)
“It’s true.” Blanche had heard Dr. Norcross at the prison say almost exactly the same thing, that the human brain wasn’t fully developed until a person reached their twenties. Was it really such a surprise, though? If you had ever known a teenager—or, for that matter, been one—wasn’t it axiomatic? Teenagers didn’t know what the hell they were doing, especially male ones. And a girl of twelve? Forget it.
Dorothy sat in the armchair by the front window. It was her condo, a neat second-floor unit on Malloy Street with plush slate-colored carpeting and fresh beige walls. The view was of the woods that backed up the building. Of the world’s current unrest, the only visible sign was a fire—like a match flame at this distance—off in the west, toward Ball’s Hill and Route 17. “It was just so cruel. I don’t care how small her brain was.”
Blanche and Margaret were seated on the couch. On the coffee table stood the open bottle of Chablis and the still-corked bottle of Pinot. There was also the plate of cookies that Dorothy had baked, and the three bottles of pills that Margaret had brought.
“I loved it,” said Margaret. “I loved the whole book. I thought all the details about nursing during the Blitz were amazing. And everything about the big battle and France and walking to the shore, wow! A real trek! An epic trek, you could say! And romance, too! It was pretty spicy stuff.” She shook her head and laughed.
Blanche twisted to look at her, annoyed despite the fact that Margaret was on her side about liking Atonement. Margaret had worked for the railroads until they gave her a nifty bundle of cash to take early retirement—some people were just so darn lucky. She was a terrible giggler, was Margaret O’Donnell, especially for someone who was past seventy, and foolish about ceramic animals, dozens of which were crowded on her windowsills. For her last book pick she’d chosen the Hemingway novel about the idiot who wouldn’t let go of the fish, a book that had aggravated Blanche, because it was, let’s face it, just a goddam fish! Margaret had thought that one was romantic, too. How could a woman like that have turned her early retirement bundle into a stock portfolio? It was a mystery.
Now Blanche said, “Come on, Midge. We’re grown women. Let’s not get silly about sex.”
“Oh, it’s not that. It’s such a grand book. We’re just so lucky to go out on this one.” Margaret rubbed her forehead. She peered at Blanche over the tops of her horn-rimmed glasses. “Wouldn’t it have been awful to die on a bad book?”
“I suppose,” Blanche replied, “but who says that this thing that’s happening is death? Who says we’re going to die?”
The meeting had been scheduled for that night long before Aurora hit—they never missed a first Thursday—and the four old friends had spent much of the day texting like teenagers, back and forth about whether, given the circumstances, they ought to cancel. No one had wanted to, though. First Thursday was First Thursday. Dorothy had texted that if it was her last night, getting dizzy with her friends sounded like the way to do it. Gail and Margaret had voted the same, and Blanche had, too, feeling a little guilty about leaving Warden Coates in the lurch but that she was well within her rights, having already gone way into overtime for which the state would not compensate her. Besides, Blanche wanted to talk about the book. Like Dorothy, she was amazed at the evil of the little girl Briony, and also, of the way that the evil child had matured into quite a different sort of adult.
Then, once they had settled in Dorothy’s living room, Margaret had produced the bottles of lorazepam. The bottles were a couple of years old. When her husband passed away, the doctor gave it to her “just to help you cope, Midge.” Margaret never took any; though she was sad to lose her husband, her nerves were fine, maybe better, actually, since once he was dead she no longer had to worry about him killing himself shoveling the driveway in the winters or climbing up on the ladder to cut tree branches that were awfully close to the power lines. But because her insurance covered the cost, she had filled the prescriptions anyway. You never knew what might come in handy, was her motto. Or when. Now it seemed that when had arrived.
“Better to do it together, was what I was thinking,” Margaret said. “Less scary that way.”
The other three had, with no significant objections, agreed that it was a good idea. Dorothy Harper was also a widow. Gail’s husband was in a nursing home and did not recognize even his children these days. And speaking of the children of the First Thursday gals, they were middle-aged adults who lived in places far from the hills of Appalachia, and no last minute reunion was feasible. Blanche, the only non-retiree among the group, had never married or had children at all, which was probably for the best, considering how things were turning out.
Now, the question Blanche had asked put the laughter to a stop.
“Maybe we’ll wake up as butterflies,” Gail said. “The cocoons I’ve seen on the news, they remind me a little of the cocoons that caterpillars make.”
“Spiders wrap up flies, too. I think the cocoons look more like that than like any sort of chrysalis,” Margaret said.
“I’m not counting on anything.” Blanche’s full glass had at some point in the last few minutes become an empty glass.
“I hope to see an angel,” Dorothy said.
The other three looked to her. She did not seem to be joking. Her wrinkled chin and mouth tightened into a tiny fist. “I’ve been pretty good, you know,” she added. “Tried to be kind. Good wife. Good mother. Good friend. Volunteered in retirement. Why, I drove all the way to Coughlin just on Monday for my committee meeting.”
“We know,” said Margaret, and extended a hand in the air toward Dorothy, who was the very definition of a good old soul. Gail echoed this, and so did Blanche.
They passed around the pill bottles and each woman took two tablets and swallowed them. Following this act of communion, the four friends sat and looked at each other.
“What should we do now?” Gail asked. “Just wait?”
“Cry,” Margaret said, and giggled as she pretended to rub at her eyes with her knuckles. “Cry, cry, cry!”
“Pass the cookies around,” Dorothy said. “I’m quitting my diet.”
“I want to get back to the book,” Blanche said. “I want to talk about how Briony changed. She was like a butterfly. I thought that was lovely. It reminded me of some of the women in the prison.”
Gail had retrieved the Pinot from the coffee table. She unwrapped the foil and stuck in the corkscrew.
While she went around pouring everyone a new glass, Blanche continued, “You know there’s a lot of recidivism—fallback, I mean—breaking parole, and getting back into bad habits and such—but some of them do change. Some of them start brand new lives. Like Briony. Isn’t that inspiring?”
“Yes,” Gail said. She raised her glass. “To emerging new lives.”
3
Frank and Elaine lingered in the doorway of Nana’s room. It was past nine. They’d laid her down on the bed, leaving aside the covers. There was a poster of a uniformed marching band on the wall and a bulletin board tacked with Nana’s best drawings of Manga characters. A wind chime of colored pipes and glass beads hung from the ceiling. Elaine insisted on neatness so there were no clothes or toys on the floor. The blinds were pulled shut. Around Nana’s head the growth was bulbous. The growths bunched around her hands were identical, only smaller. Mittens with no thumbs.
Though neither had said anything, after standing together in silence for more than a minute, Frank realized that they were both afraid to turn off the light.
“Let’s come back and check on her again in a little while.” Out of habit, Frank whispered this to Elaine, as on so many occasions when they were desperate to keep from waking Nana, instead of the opposite.
Elaine nodded. As one, they retreated from their daughter’s open door and went downstairs to the kitchen.
While Elaine sat at the table, Frank made a pot of coffee, filling the urn, sifting out the grounds. It was something he’d done a thousand times before, though never at so late an hour. The normality of the activity soothed him.
She was thinking along similar lines. “It’s like the old days, isn’t it? Sick baby upstairs, us down here, wondering if we’re doing the right things.”
Frank pressed the brew button. Elaine had her head on the table, tucked between her arms.
“You should sit up,” he said gently, and took the chair across from her.
She nodded and sat up straight. Her bangs were stuck to her forehead and she had the querulous, what’s-that-who-now? look of someone who had recently absorbed a blow to the skull. He didn’t suppose he looked any better.
“Anyway, I know what you mean,” said Frank. “I remember. Questioning how we ever could have tricked ourselves into thinking we could take care of another human being in the first place.”
This brought a bright smile to Elaine’s face. Whatever was happening to them now, they’d survived an infant together—no small achievement.
The coffee machine beeped. For a moment, it had seemed quiet, but Frank suddenly became aware of the noise outside. Someone was yelling. There were police sirens, a car alarm whooping. He instinctively tilted his ear toward the stairs, toward Nana.
He didn’t hear anything, of course he didn’t; she wasn’t a baby anymore, and these weren’t the old days, weren’t like any days ever before. The way Nana was sleeping tonight, it was impossible to imagine what kind of racket would rouse her, cause her to open her eyes beneath that layer of white fiber.
Elaine had her head canted the same way toward the stairs.
“What is this, Frank?”
“I don’t know.” He broke away from her gaze. “We shouldn’t have left the hospital.” Implying that Elaine had made them go, not sure he really believed it, but needing to share the blame, to kick a little of the dirt he felt on himself back onto her. That he knew he was doing this, knew it exactly, made him hate himself. He couldn’t stop, though. “We should have stayed. Nana needs a doctor.”
“They all do, Frank. Soon I’ll need a doctor, too.” She poured herself a cup of the coffee. Years passed while she stirred in milk and Equal. He thought that part of the discussion was over, but then she said, “You should be grateful that I made us leave.”
“What?”
“It saved you from doing whatever you might have done if we hadn’t.”
“What are you talking about?”
But he knew, of course. Each marriage had its own language, its own code words, built of mutual experience. She said two of them now: “Fritz Meshaum.”
At each rotation of her spoon, it clicked against the ceramic of the mug—click, click, click. Like the combination dial on a safe.
4
Fritz Meshaum.
A name of ill repute, one Frank wished he could forget, but would Elaine let him? No. Shouting at Nana’s teacher that time had been bad, and the famous wall punch had been worse, but the Fritz Meshaum incident was worst of all. Fritz Meshaum was the dead rat she waved in his face whenever she felt pushed into a corner, as she did tonight. If only she could see they were in the corner together, on the same side, Nana’s side, but no. Instead, she had to bring up Fritz Meshaum. She had to wave the dead rat.
Frank had been hunting a fox, not that unusual in the wooded Tri-County area. Someone had seen one running around in the fields south of Route 17, not far from the women’s prison. It had its tongue hanging out, and the caller thought it might be rabid. Frank had his doubts, but he took rabies calls seriously. Any animal control officer worth his salt did. He drove out to the collapsing barn where the sighting had occurred, and spent a half hour stalking around in the puckies. He didn’t find anything except the rusted-out skeleton of a 1982 Cutlass with a pair of rotting panties knotted to the antenna.
On the way back to the shoulder where he’d parked his truck, he cut alongside a fenced property. The fence was a mix of junk, decaying planks, hubcaps, and corrugated sheet metal so full of holes it did more to invite attention than to discourage intruders. Through the gaps, Frank took in the peeling white house and shabby yard beyond. A tire swing on a fraying rope hung from an oak tree, black tattered clothes surrounded by circling insects were piled at the base of the tree, a milk crate full of iron scraps stood guard by the porch steps, a (presumably empty) oil can was carelessly pitched aside to rest like a hat on top of an unruly growth of bougainvillea which was itself partially draped over the porch. Glass fragments from a smashed second-floor window were scattered over the bare tarpaper roof, and a brand new Toyota pickup, blue as the Pacific, stood waxed up and parked in the driveway. Littered around its rear tires were a dozen or so spent shotgun shells, once bright red, now faded to pallid pink, as if they had been there a long time.
It was so perfectly country, the wreck of a house and the shiny truck, that Frank almost laughed out loud. He strolled on, smiling to himself, his mind requiring several seconds to compute something that hadn’t made sense: the black clothes had been moving. Shifting around.
Frank retraced his steps to a break in the hodgepodge fence. He watched the clothes. They breathed.
And it happened the way it always seemed to, as if in a dream. He didn’t slip under the fence and actually walk across the yard so much as he seemed to teleport the distance separating him from the black shape under the tree.
It was a dog, although Frank wouldn’t have wanted to guess which breed—something medium-sized, maybe a shepherd, maybe a young Lab, maybe just a country mongrel. The black fur was tattered and flea-bitten. Where the fur was gone, there were infected patches of exposed skin. The animal’s only visible eye was a small white pool sunk into a vaguely head-like shape. Twisted around the dog were four limbs, all of them askew, all clearly broken. Grotesquely—since how could it possibly have run away?—a chain was looped around its neck and fastened to the tree. The dog’s side lifted and fell with one breath after another.
“You are trespassin!” announced a voice behind Frank. “Boy, I got a gun on you!”
Frank put up his hands and turned around to behold Fritz Meshaum.
A little man, gnome-like with his stringy red hillbilly beard, he wore jeans and a faded tee-shirt. “Frank?” Fritz sounded perplexed.
They knew each other, though not well, from the Squeaky Wheel. Frank remembered that Fritz was a mechanic, and that some people said you could buy a gun from him if you wanted one. Whether that was true or not, Frank couldn’t have said, but they had swapped rounds a few months earlier, seated at the bar and watching a college football game together. Fritz—this dog-torturing monster—had expressed his fondness for the option play; he didn’t think the Mountaineers had the talent to air it out with any sustained success. Frank was happy to go along with that; he didn’t know much about the sport. Toward the end of the game, though, once Meshaum was full of beer, he had quit harping on the merits of the option and attempted to engage Frank on the subject of Jews and the federal government. “Them hooky-noses got the whole thing in their pocket, you know that?” Fritz had leaned forward. “I mean, my people come from Germany. So I know.” That had been Frank’s cue to excuse himself.
Now Fritz lowered the rifle he had been aiming. “What are you doin here? Come to buy a gun? I could sell you a good one, long or short. Hey, you want a beer?”
Although Frank didn’t say anything, some kind of message must have been transmitted by his body language, because Fritz added, in a tone of chagrin, “That dog worry you? Don’t let it. Sumbitch bit my neffe.”
“Your what?”
“Neffe. Nephew.” Fritz shook his head. “Some of the old words, they stick. You’d be surprised how—”
And that was the last thing Meshaum got out.
When Frank finished, the rifle butt he had taken from the bastard and used to do most of the work had been cracked and spattered with blood. The other man sprawled in the dirt, holding his crotch where Frank had repeatedly hammered the rifle butt. His eyes were buried under swelling, and he was spitting up blood with each shaky breath that he dragged out from under the ribs that Frank had sprained or broken for him. The possibility that Fritz would die from the beating had seemed, in the immediate aftermath, not unlikely.
Maybe he had not hurt Fritz Meshaum as badly as he thought, though—that was what he had told himself, even as, for weeks, he kept an eye on the obituary section, and no one came to arrest him. But Frank was without guilt. It had been a little dog, and little dogs couldn’t fight back. There wasn’t any excuse for it, for torturing an animal like that, no matter how ill-tempered it might be. Some dogs were capable of killing a person. However, no dog would do to a person what Fritz Meshaum had done to that pitiful creature chained to the base of the tree. What could a dog understand of the pleasure men could take from cruelty? Nothing, and it could never learn. Frank understood, though, and he felt calm in his soul about what he had done to Fritz Meshaum.
As for Meshaum’s wife, how was Frank supposed to know the man even had a wife? Although he did now. Oh, yes. Elaine made sure of that.
5
“His wife?” Frank asked. “Is that where you’re going with this? Didn’t surprise me she turned up at the shelter. Fritz Meshaum’s a son of a bitch.”
When there had first been talk around town, Elaine had asked if it was true, that he had put a hurting on Fritz Meshaum. He had made the mistake of telling her the truth, and she never let him forget it.
Elaine set aside the spoon and drank from her coffee. “No argument there.”
“I hope she finally left him,” said Frank. “Not that she’s any responsibility of mine.”
“It’s not your responsibility that her husband, once he was healed up enough to go home from the hospital after the beating you gave him, beat her within an inch of her life?”
“Nope, absolutely not. I never laid a hand on her. We’ve been over this.”
“Uh-huh. And the baby she lost,” said Elaine, “that’s not your responsibility, either, right?”
Frank sucked his teeth. He didn’t know about any baby. It was the first time Elaine had mentioned it. She’d been waiting for exactly the right moment to ambush him. Some wife, some friend.
“Pregnant, huh? And lost the baby. Gee, that’s a tough one.”
Elaine fixed him with an unbelieving look. “That’s what you call it? A tough one? Your compassion stuns me. None of it would have happened if you’d just called the police. None of it, Frank. He’d have gone to jail and Candy Meshaum would have kept her baby.”
Guilt trips were Elaine’s specialty. But if she’d seen the dog—what Fritz had done to it—she might think twice about giving him the stinkeye. The Meshaums of the world had to pay. It was the same with Dr. Flickinger . . .
Which gave him an idea.
“Why don’t I go get the Mercedes man? He’s a doctor.”
“You mean the guy who ran over that old man’s cat?”
“Yeah. He felt really bad about driving so fast. I’m sure he’d help.”
“Did you hear any of what I just said, Frank? You go crazy and it always backfires!”
“Elaine, forget about Fritz Meshaum and forget about his wife. Forget about me. Think about Nana. Maybe that doc could help.” Flickinger might even feel he owed Frank, for taking it out on his car instead of busting his way inside and taking it out on the good doctor himself.
There were more sirens. A motorcycle passed down the street, engine roaring.
“Frank, I’d like to believe that.” Her speech, slow and careful, was intended to be sincere, but it was the same cadence Elaine adopted when she explained to Nana how important it was to keep neat drawers. “Because I love you. But I know you. We were together for ten years. You beat a man half to death over a dog. God knows how you handled this Flickmuller, or whatever his name is.”
“Flickinger. His name is Garth Flickinger. Doctor Garth Flickinger.” Really, how could she be so dumb? Hadn’t they almost been trampled—or shot!—while trying to get a doctor to see their daughter?
She drank down the rest of her coffee. “Just be here with your daughter. Don’t try to fix what you don’t even understand.”
A dismal comprehension touched Frank Geary: everything would be easier once Elaine was asleep, too. But for now she was awake. So was he.
“You’re wrong,” he said.
She blinked at him. “What? What did you say?”
“You think you’re always right. Sometimes you are, but not this time.”
“Thank you for that wonderful insight. I’m going upstairs to sit with Nana. Come with me if you want, but if you go after that man—if you go anywhere else—we’re done.”
Frank smiled. He felt okay now. It was such a relief to feel okay. “We already are.”
She stared at him.
“Nana’s what matters to me now. Just her.”
6
Frank stopped on the way to his truck to look at the woodpile by the back stoop, hardwood he’d split himself. Half a cord left from the winter just past. The little Jøtul stove in the kitchen made the place homey and welcoming in the cold weather. Nana liked to sit near it in the rocker, doing her homework. When she was bent over her books with her hair curtaining her face, she looked to Frank like a little girl from the nineteenth century, back when all these man-woman things were a lot simpler. Back then, you told a woman what you were going to do, and she either agreed or kept her mouth shut. He remembered something his father had told his mother when she protested over the purchase of a new power lawnmower: You keep the house. I’ll make the money and pay the bills. If you got a problem with that, speak up.
She hadn’t. They’d had a good marriage that way. Almost fifty years. No marriage counseling, no separations, no lawyers.
There was a big tarp over the woodpile and a smaller one over the chopping block. He raised the smaller and pulled the hand-ax free from the scarred wood. Flickinger didn’t seem like much, but it never hurt to be prepared.
7
Dorothy went first. Head lolling back, mouth open, dentures slipping slightly and flecked with cookie crumbs, she snored. The other three watched the white strings float and untether, split and float, float and fall down against her skin. They layered like bandages in miniature, wrapping in crisscross patterns.
“I wish—” Margaret began, but whatever it was she wished, she didn’t seem to be able to catch hold of the thing.
“Do you think she’s suffering?” Blanche asked. “Do you think it hurts?” Though her words felt heavy in her mouth, she herself was not in any pain.
“No.” Gail tottered to her feet, her library copy of Atonement dropping to the floor with a flop of paper and crinkle of plastic sheeting. She braced herself on the furniture as she crossed the room toward Dorothy.
Blanche was hazily impressed by this effort. Along with the pills, they’d dispatched the bottle of Pinot, and Gail had drunk the most. There was an officer at the prison who competed in arm-wrestling contests. Blanche wondered if there were contests for drinking wine and taking drugs and then walking around without tripping over the chairs or running into the walls. Gail might have missed her calling!
Blanche wanted to express all this to Gail, but she found that the best she could do was, “Nice—walking—Gail.”
She watched as Gail bent down close to Dorothy’s ear, which was already layered in a thin coating of web. “Dorothy? Can you hear us? Meet me at the—” Gail stopped.
“What place do we know is in heaven, Midge? Where should I have her meet us?”
Only Margaret didn’t answer. Couldn’t. The threads were now circling and knitting around her head, too.
Blanche’s eyes, seeming to move around of their own accord, found the window, and the fire in the west. It was bigger now, not a match but a flaming bird’s head. There were still men to fight the fire, but maybe they were too busy taking care of their women to bother. What was the name of that bird, the one that changed into fire, reborn, magic bird, scary, terrible? She didn’t know. All she could remember was an old Japanese monster movie called Rodan. She had watched it as a child, and the giant bird in it had frightened her badly. She wasn’t frightened now, just . . . interested.
“We have lost my sister,” Gail announced. She had sunk to the carpet and was leaning against Dorothy’s legs.
“She’s just asleep,” Blanche said. “You didn’t lose her, honey.”
Gail nodded so emphatically that her hair fell into her eyes. “Yes, yes. You’re right, Blanche. We’ll just have to find each other. Just look for each other in heaven. Or . . . you know . . . a reasonable facsimile.” That made her laugh.
8
Blanche was the last. She crawled over to be near Gail, asleep beneath a layer of webbing.
“I had a love,” Blanche told her. “Bet you didn’t know that. We kept it . . . as the girls at the prison like to say . . . on the down-low. Had to.”
The filaments that lay over her friend’s mouth stirred as Gail exhaled. One fine thread extended itself flirtatiously in Blanche’s direction.
“I think he loved me, too, but . . .” It was hard to explain. She was young. When you were young, your brain wasn’t fully developed. You didn’t know about men. It was sad. He had been married. She had waited. They had aged. Blanche had given up the sweetest part of her soul for a man. He had made beautiful promises and kept none of them. What a waste.
“This might be the best thing that ever happened.” If Gail had been awake, these words of Blanche’s might have been too low and garbled for her to understand. Feeling had left Blanche’s tongue. “Because at least we’re all together, now, at the end.”
And if there was something else, somewhere else . . .
Before Blanche McIntyre could finish the thought, she drifted away.
9
Garth Flickinger wasn’t surprised to see Frank.
After having watched NewsAmerica for the last twelve hours or so, and smoking everything in the house except for his pet iguana (Gillies), probably nothing would have surprised him. Should Sir Harold Gillies himself, that long-dead pioneer of plastic surgery, have come wandering downstairs to the kitchen to toast a cinnamon Pop-Tart, it would have barely pushed the envelope on the phenomena that Garth had witnessed on television that day.
The shock of the violence that had broken out in Truman Mayweather’s trailer while Garth was in the john was but a prologue to what he had absorbed in the hours since, just sitting on the couch. Rioting outside the White House, a woman gnawing off the nose of a religious cultist, a huge 767 lost at sea, bloodied nursing home orderlies, elderly women swathed in webs and handcuffed to their gurneys, fires in Melbourne, fires in Manila, and fires in Honolulu. Something very fucking bad had occurred in the desert outside Reno where there was evidently some kind of secret government nuclear facility; scientists were reporting on Geiger counters spinning and seismographs jerking up and down, detecting continuing detonations. Everywhere women were falling asleep and growing cocoons and everywhere dumbfucks were waking them up. The wonderful NewsAmerica reporter, Michaela with the first-rate nose job, had vanished in the mid-afternoon and they’d promoted a stuttering intern with a lip ring to take her place. It reminded Garth of a piece of graffiti he’d seen on some men’s room wall: THERE IS NO GRAVITY, THE EARTH JUST SUCKS.
This sucked: in and out, back and forth, all the way around. Not even the meth helped. Well, it helped a little, but not as much as it should have. By the time the doorbell began ringing—cling-clong, cling-clong, went the chimes—Garth was feeling glaringly sober. He felt no particular urge to answer, not tonight. Nor did he feel compelled to rise when his visitor gave up on the bell and began knocking. Then hammering. Very energetic!
The hammering ceased. Garth had time to think his unwelcome visitor had given up before the chopping began. Chopping and splintering. The door shuddered inward, broken free of its lock, and the man who had been here earlier strode in, an ax in one hand. Garth supposed the guy was here to kill him—and he didn’t feel too sad about that. It would hurt, but hopefully not for too long.
Plastic surgery was a joke to many people. Not to Garth. What was funny about wanting to like your face, your body, your only skin? Unless you were cruel or stupid, there was nothing funny about it. Only now, it seemed, the joke was on him. What kind of life would it be with only half the species? A cruel and stupid life. Garth could see that right away. Beautiful women often arrived at his office with photographs of other beautiful women, and they asked, “Can you make me look like her?” And behind many beautiful women who wanted to tinker with their perfect faces were mean fuckers who were never satisfied. Garth didn’t want to be left alone in a world of mean fuckers, because there were so many of them.
“Don’t stand on ceremony, come on in. I’ve just been catching up on the news. You didn’t happen to see the part where the woman bit the man’s nose off his face, did you?”
“I did,” said Frank.
“I’m great with noses, and I enjoy a challenge, but if there’s nothing to work with, there’s not much you can do.”
Frank stood at the corner of the couch, a few feet from Garth. The ax was a small one, but still an ax.
“Do you plan to kill me?”
“What? No. I came—”
They were both distracted by the flatscreen, where a news camera showed a view of a burning Apple Store. On the sidewalk in front of the store, a man with a fire-blackened face moved around in a dazed little circle, a smoldering fuchsia handbag looped over his shoulder. The Apple symbol above the entrance of the store suddenly came loose of its moorings and crashed to the ground.
A quick cut brought the viewing audience back to George Alderson. George’s color was a wind-stripped gray, and his voice was gravelly. He’d been on all day. “I just received a call from my—ah, son. He went to my house to check on my wife. Sharon and I have been married for—” The anchor dropped his head and traced the knot of his pink tie. There was a coffee stain on the tie. Garth thought this the most disturbing signal yet of the unprecedented nature of the situation. “—for forty-two years now. Timothy, my son, he . . . he says . . .” George Alderson began to sob. Frank picked up the controller from the side table and turned him off.
“Is your mind clear enough to understand what’s going on, Dr. Flickinger?” Frank indicated the pipe on the side table.
“Of course.” Garth felt a tick of curiosity. “You really aren’t here to kill me?”
Frank pinched the bridge of his nose. Garth had the impression he was watching the outside of a serious internal monologue.
“I’m here to ask a favor. You do it, and we’re all square. It’s my daughter. She’s the only good thing in my life anymore. And now she’s got it. The Aurora. I need you to come and look at her and . . .” His mouth opened and closed a few times, but that was the end of his words.
A thought of his own daughter, of Cathy, came to Garth’s mind.
“Say no more,” Garth said, snipping the thought off and letting it flutter away, a bit of ribbon in a stiff wind.
“Yeah? Really?”
Garth held out a hand. He might have surprised Frank Geary, but he hadn’t surprised himself. There were so many things that couldn’t be helped. Garth was always glad when he could. And it would be interesting to see this Aurora business up close.
“Of course. Help me up, would you?”
Frank got him on his feet, and after a few steps Garth was fine. The doctor excused himself for a moment, stepping into a sideroom. When he emerged he carried a small black case and a medical bag. They went outside into the night. Garth brushed his hand through the branches of the lilac tree protruding from the back left passenger window of his Mercedes as they went to Frank’s truck, but refrained from comment.
10
The fox limped away from the grassfire the burning woman had started, but he carried a fire inside him. It was burning inside his lower back. This was bad, because he couldn’t run fast now, and he could smell his own blood. If he could smell his blood, other things could, as well.
A few mountain lions still remained in these woods, and if one caught wind of his bloody back and haunch, he was finished. It had been a long time since he had seen a mountain lion, not since his mother was full of milk and his four littermates were alive (all dead now, one from drinking bad water, one from eating a poison bait, one taken in a trap that tore her leg as she squealed and cried, one disappeared in the night), but there were also wild pigs. The fox feared them more than the mountain lions. They had escaped some farmer’s pen and bred in the woods. Now there were lots of them. Ordinarily, the fox would have had no problem escaping them and might even have enjoyed teasing them a bit; they were very clumsy. Tonight, though, he could hardly run. Soon he would not even be able to trot.
The woods ended at a metal house that smelled of human blood and human death. Yellow strips hung around it. There were metal man-things in the weeds and lying on the crushed stone in front. Mixed in with the death scents was another, something he had never smelled before. Not a human smell, exactly, but like a human smell.
And female.
Putting aside his fear of the wild pigs, the fox moved away from the metal house, limping and occasionally collapsing on his side while he panted and waited for the pain to subside. Then he went on. He had to go on. That scent was exotic, both sweet and bitter at the same time, irresistible. Perhaps it would take him to a place of safety. It didn’t seem likely, but the fox was desperate.
That exotic smell grew stronger. Mixed into it was another female smell, but this one was fresher and clearly human. The fox paused to sniff at one of Lila’s shoe prints in the loam, then a patch of white stuff in the shape of a bare human foot.
A small bird fluttered down to a low-hanging branch. Not a hawk this time. This was a kind of bird the fox had never seen before. It was green. A scent drifted from it, humid and tangy, for which the fox had no context. It fluffed its wings self-importantly.
“Please don’t sing,” the fox said.
“All right,” the green bird said. “I rarely do at night, anyway. I see you are bleeding. Does it hurt?”
The fox was too tired to dissemble. “Yes.”
“Roll in the web. It will stop the pain.”
“It will poison me,” the fox said. His back was burning, but he knew about poison, oh yes. The humans poisoned everything. It was their best talent.
“No. The poison is leaving these woods. Roll in the web.”
Perhaps the bird was lying, but the fox saw no other recourse. He fell on his side, then rolled onto his back, as he sometimes did in deer scat, to confuse his scent. Blessed coolness doused the pain in his back and haunch. He rolled once more, then sprang to his feet, looking up at the branch with bright eyes.
“What are you? Where did you come from?” the fox asked.
“The Mother Tree.”
“Where is it?”
“Follow your nose,” said the green bird, and flew off into the darkness.
The fox went from one bare webbed footprint to the next, pausing twice more to roll in them. They cooled him and refreshed him and gave him strength. The woman-scent remained quite strong, that exotic not-quite-woman-scent fainter. Together they told the fox a story. The not-woman had come first and gone east, toward the metal house and the shed that was now burned. The real woman had come later, back-trailing the not-woman to some destination ahead, and then, later, returning to the stinking metal house with the yellow strips around it.
The fox followed the entwined scents into a brushy brake, up the other side, and through a stand of stunted fir trees. Tattered webs hung from some of the branches, giving off that exotic not-woman smell. Beyond was a clearing. The fox trotted into it. He trotted easily now, and felt he could not just run if one of those pigs showed up, but glide away. In the clearing he sat, looking up at a tree that seemed made of many trunks wrapped around each other. It rose into the dark sky higher than he could see. Although there was no wind, the tree rustled, as if talking to itself. Here the not-woman smell was lost in a hundred other traces of scent. Many birds and many animals, none of which the fox knew.
A cat came padding around from the far side of the great tree. Not a wildcat; it was much bigger. And it was white. In the dark, its green eyes were like lamps. Although the instinct to run from predators was bone-deep in the fox, he did not move. The great white tiger padded steadily toward him. The grass of the clearing rustled as it bent beneath the dense fur of its belly.
When the tiger was only five feet away, the fox lay down and rolled over, showing his own belly in submission. A fox might harbor some pride, but dignity was useless.
“Get up,” the tiger said.
The fox got to his feet and timidly stretched his neck forward to touch the tiger’s nose.
“Are you healed?” the tiger asked.
“Yes.”
“Then listen to me, fox.”
11
In her prison cell, Evie Black lay with her eyes closed and a faint smile on her lips.
“Then listen to me, fox,” she said. “I have work for you.”