CHAPTER 4
1
In the world the women had somehow exited, Candy Meshaum had resided in a house on West Lavin, in the direction of the prison. Which was fitting, because her house had also been a prison. In this new world, she had chosen to live with some other women, all regular attendees of the Meeting, in an enclave they’d made out of a storage facility. The storage facility, like the Shopwell (and unlike the great majority of the other buildings in the area), had stayed almost entirely water-tight over the indeterminate number of years of abandonment. It was an L-shaped structure of two levels, box-upon-box-upon-box, hacked out of the surrounding woods and planted on a cement tarmac. Built of hard plastics and fiberglass, the storage pods had admirably fulfilled the leakproof promise of the faded advertisement on the sign outside. Grasses and trees had encroached on the tarmac, and leaves clogged the gutter system, but it had been an easy project to cut back the overgrowth and clear the drainage, and the opened pods, once emptied of useless boxes of possessions, had proven to be excellent if not exactly beautiful housing.
Although Candy Meshaum had made a sweet try at it, hadn’t she, Lila thought.
She walked around the box, which was filled with the natural light that came through the open bay door. There was a nicely made bed in the middle of the room, draped in a glossy red comforter that picked up the daylight. Hung on the windowless wall was a framed seascape: fair skies and a length of rocky coast. It had perhaps been scavenged from the original stored contents of the pod. In the corner was a rocking chair, and on the floor beside the chair was a basket of yarn punctured by two brass needles. Another basket nearby contained pairs of expertly knitted socks, examples of her work.
“What do you think?” Coates had lingered outside the box to smoke. (Cigarettes, wrapped in foil and cellophane, were another of the things that had lasted quite well.) The warden—former warden—had grown her hair out, allowing it to go white. The way it spread down to her narrow shoulders gave her a prophetic look—as if she had been wandering in the desert in search of her tribe. Lila thought it suited her.
“I like what you’ve done with your hair.”
“Thanks, but I was referring to the woman who ought to be here, but suddenly isn’t.”
Candy Meshaum was one of four women who had lately vanished, counting Essie. Lila had interviewed a number of other women who lived in the neighboring pods. Candy had been seen happily rocking in her chair, knitting, and ten minutes afterward, she was nowhere. The pod was on the second floor of the storage complex, close to the middle, and yet not a single person had seen her slip away, a good-sized woman with a bad limp. It wasn’t inconceivable that she’d managed such a disappearance, but it was improbable.
Her neighbors described Candy as cheerful and happy. One of them, who had known her before, in the old world, used the word reborn. She evinced great pride in her crafts, and in her pretty little decorated box of a home. More than one person mentioned that she referred to her home as “the apartment of her dreams” without a crumb of irony.
“I don’t see anything definitive. Nothing I’d want to take to court,” Lila said. She guessed, however, that what had happened was what had occurred with Essie: there one second, gone the next. Poof. Abracadabra.
“Same thing, isn’t it?” Janice, who had been looking right at Essie, reported seeing a tiny flash—no bigger than a lighter flame—and then nothing. The space that the woman had filled was empty. Janice’s eyes had failed to detect the transformation, or disintegration, or whatever phenomenon had occurred. It was too quick for the eye. It was, the warden said, as if Essie had been turned off like a light bulb, except not even a filament dimmed that quickly.
“Could be,” Lila said. God, she sounded like her lost husband.
“She’s dead,” Janice said. “In the other world. Don’t you think so?”
A moth perched on the wall above the rocking chair. Lila held out her hand. The moth fluttered to it, landing on the fingernail of her index finger. Lila smelled a faint odor of burn.
“Could be,” she repeated. For the moment, this Clint-ism was all she dared to say. “We ought to go back and see the ladies off.”
“Crazy idea,” Janice grumbled. “We’ve got enough to do without exploring.”
Lila smiled. “Does that mean you wish you were going?”
Mimicking Lila, ex–Warden Coates said, “Could be.”
2
On Main Street, a patrol was about to set off for a look at the world beyond Dooling. There were a half-dozen women in the group, and they’d packed a pair of the golf carts with supplies. Millie Olson, an officer from the prison, had volunteered to take the lead. To this point, no one had ventured much beyond the old town lines. No airplanes or helicopters had flown overhead, no fires had burned in the distance, and no voices had surfaced on the bands of the emergency radios they’d cranked up. It reinforced in Lila that sense of incompleteness she’d felt from the beginning. The world they inhabited now seemed like a reproduction. Almost like a scene inside a snow globe, only without the snow.
Lila and Janice arrived in time to watch the final preparations. A former prisoner named Nell Seeger crouched on the ground by one of the golf carts, humming to herself as she checked the air pressure on the tires. Millie was sifting through the packs loaded onto a trailer hitched to the back, making last minute double-checks of the supplies: sleeping bags, freeze-dried food, clean water, clothes, a couple of toy walkie-talkies that had been found sealed in plastic and actually functioned (somewhat), a couple of rifles that Lila herself had cleaned up, first aid kits. There was an atmosphere of excitement and good humor; there were laughter and high-fives. Someone asked Millie Olson what she’d do if they ran into a bear.
“Tame it,” she deadpanned, not glancing up from the pack she was digging through. This earned a round of laughs from the onlookers.
“Did you know her?” Lila asked Janice. “You know, before?” They were under a sidewalk awning, shoulder to shoulder in winter coats. Their breath steamed.
“Shit, I was her damn boss.”
“Not Millie, Candy Meshaum.”
“No. Did you?”
“Yes,” said Lila.
“And?”
“She was a domestic abuse victim. Her husband beat her. A lot. That’s why she limped. He was a total asshole, a mechanic who made his real money selling guns. Ran a bit with the Griners. Or so it was rumored—we never managed to clip him for anything. He used his tools on her. They lived out on West Lavin in a house that was falling down around their ears. I’m not surprised she didn’t want to try to fix the place up, wouldn’t have been any point. Neighbors called us out more than once, heard her screaming, but she wouldn’t give us a word. Afraid of reprisals.”
“Lucky he never killed her.”
“I think he probably did.”
The warden squinted at Lila. “Do you mean what I think you mean?”
“Walk with me.”
They strolled along the ruins of the sidewalk, stepping over weed-choked fissures, detouring around asphalt chunks. The little park that faced the broken remains of the Municipal Building had been salvaged, trimmed and swept. Here the only sign of time’s passage was the toppled statue of some long-deceased town dignitary. A massive elm branch—storm-tossed, surely—had knocked him off his perch. The branch had been dragged away and chipped, but the dignitary was so heavy no one had done anything about him yet. He had gone down at an acute angle from the plinth, his top hat dug into the ground and his boots to the sky; Lila had seen little girls run up him, using his backside like a ramp, laughing wildly.
Janice said, “You think her son-of-a-bitch husband torched her in her cocoon.”
Lila didn’t answer directly. “Has anyone mentioned feeling dizzy to you? Nauseated? Comes on very suddenly, and then after a couple of hours it goes?” Lila had felt this herself a couple of times. Rita Coombs had mentioned a similar experience; so had Mrs. Ransom, and Molly.
“Yes,” said Janice. “Just about everyone I know has mentioned it. Like being spun around without being spun. I don’t know if you know Nadine Hicks, wife of my colleague at the prison—”
“Met her at a couple of community potlucks,” said Lila, and wrinkled her nose.
“Yeah, she hardly ever missed. And wasn’t missed when she did, if you know what I mean. Anyway, she claims to have that vertigo thing just about all the time.”
“Okay, keep that in mind. Now think about the mass burnings. You know about those?”
“Not personally. I’m like you, I came relatively early. But I’ve heard the newer arrivals talk about seeing it on the news: men burning women in their cocoons.”
“There you go,” Lila said.
“Oh,” Janice replied, getting the drift. “Oh shit.”
“Oh shit covers it, all right. At first I thought—hoped—that maybe it was some sort of misinterpretation on the part of the newer arrivals. They’d been sleep-deprived, of course, and distressed, and maybe they saw something on television that they thought was cocoons being burned, but was actually something else.” Lila inhaled deeply of the late fall air. It was so crisp and clean it made you feel taller. No exhaust smells. No coal trucks. “That instinct, to doubt what women say, it’s always there. To find some reason not to take their word. Men do it . . . but we do, too. I do it.”
“You’re too hard on yourself.”
“And I saw it coming. I talked about it with Terry Coombs not more than three or four hours before I fell asleep in the old world. Women reacted when their cocoons were torn. They were dangerous. They fought. They killed. It doesn’t surprise me that a lot of men might see the situation as an opportunity, or a precaution, or the pretext they’d always wanted to light a few people on fire.”
Janice offered a slanted smile. “And I get accused of taking a less than sunny view of the human race.”
“Someone burned Essie, Janice. Back in our world. Who knows who. And someone burned Candy Meshaum. Was her hubby upset because his punching bag fell asleep on him? He’d definitely be the first person I’d question, if I was there.”
Lila sat down on the fallen statue. “And the dizziness? I’m pretty sure that’s also because of what’s happening back there. Someone moving us. Moving us around like furniture. Right before Essie was burned, she was in a low mood. I’m guessing that maybe someone moved her a bit before lighting her up and it was the vertigo that had her down.”
“Pretty sure you’ve got your ass on Dooling’s first mayor,” said Janice.
“He can take it. Someone washed his underwear for him. This is our new honorary bench.” Lila realized she was furious. What had Essie or Candy Meshaum ever done, except finally find a few months of happiness out of the entirety of their rotten lives? Happiness that had come at the price of nothing more than a few dolls and a converted storage space with no windows.
And men had burned them. She was sure of it. That was how their story ended. When you died there, you died here, too. Men had ripped them right out of the world—right out of two worlds. Men. There seemed to be no escape from them.
Janice must have read her thoughts . . . or, more likely, her face. “My husband Archie was a good guy. Supported everything I ever did.”
“Yeah, but he died young. You might not have felt that way if he’d stuck around.” It was an awful thing to say, but Lila didn’t regret it. For some reason, an old Amish saying occurred to her: KISSIN’ DON’T LAST, COOKIN’ DO. You could say that about a lot of things when it came to the wedded state. Honesty. Respect. Simple kindness, even.
Coates gave no sign of offense. “Clint was that bad a husband?”
“He was better than Candy Meshaum’s.”
“Low bar,” Janice said. “Never mind. I’ll just sit here and treasure the gilded memory of my husband, who had the decency to pop off before he became a shit.”
Lila let her head loll back. “Maybe I deserved that.” It was another sunny day, but there were gray clouds to the north, miles of them.
“Well? Was he that bad a husband?”
“No. Clint was a good husband. And a good father. He pulled his weight. He loved me. I never doubted that. But there was a lot he never told me about himself. Things I shouldn’t have had to find out in ways that made me feel bad about myself. Clint talked the talk, about openness and support, talked until his face turned blue, but when you got below the surface, he was your basic Marlboro Man. It’s worse, I think, than being lied to. A lie indicates a certain degree of respect. I’m pretty sure he was carrying a bag of stuff, real heavy stuff, that he thought I was just too delicate to help him with. I’d rather be lied to than condescended to.”
“What do you mean by a bag of stuff . . . ?”
“He grew up rough. I think he fought his way out, and I mean that literally. I’ve seen the way he rubs his knuckles when he’s preoccupied or upset. But he doesn’t talk about it. I’ve asked, and he does the Marlboro Man thing.” Lila glanced at Coates, and read some variety of unease in her expression.
“You know what I mean, don’t you? From being around him.”
“I suppose I do. Clint has—another side. A harder side. Angrier. I didn’t come to see it clearly until recently.”
“It pisses me off. But you know what’s worse? It’s left me feeling kind of . . . disheartened.”
Janice was using a twig to poke bits of caked mud off the face of the statue. “I can see how that would dishearten a person.”
The golf carts started to move away, followed by their small, tarp-draped trailers of supplies. The procession moved out of sight and then reappeared for a couple of minutes where the road ascended to higher ground before disappearing for good.
Lila and Janice switched to other topics: the ongoing repairs to the houses on Smith; the two beautiful horses that had been corralled and taught—or perhaps re-taught—how to take riders; and the wonder Magda Dubcek and those two former prisoners claimed to be on the verge of bringing to fruition. If they could get more juice, more solar panels, clean running water seemed to be a foreseeable possibility. Indoor plumbing, the American dream.
It was dusk before they were talked out, and never once did the subject of Clint, of Jared, of Archie, of Candy Meshaum’s husband, of Jesus Christ, or of any other man, again arise to trouble their discourse.
3
They didn’t talk about Evie, but Lila had not forgotten her. She had not forgotten about the suggestive timing of Eve Black’s appearance in Dooling, or her strange, knowing talk, or the webbed tracks in the woods near Truman Mayweather’s trailer. She had not forgotten about where those tracks had brought her, either, to the Amazing Tree, driving up into the sky on its countless roots and intertwined trunks. As for the animals that had appeared from around the Tree—the white tiger, the snake, the peacock, and the fox—Lila remembered them, too.
Her mental picture of the spiraling roots of the Tree, like the cords for a giant’s sneakers, the way they wound around each other, recurred often. It was so perfect, so majestic, the plan of its being so right.
Had Evie come from the Tree? Or had the Tree come from Evie? And the women of Our Place—were they dreamers, or were they the dream?
4
Icy rain pelted Our Place for forty-eight hours, snapping tree branches, pouring chilly slop through the holes in roofs, filling the streets and walks with cloudy puddles. Lila, stretched in her tent, occasionally put aside the book she was reading to kick at the walls and break off the frozen coating that had formed on the vinyl. The sound was like breaking glass.
Before, she’d switched from paper books to an e-reader, little suspecting that the world would break down and make such things obsolete. There were still books in her house, though, and a few of them weren’t moldy. When she finished the one she was reading, she ventured from her tent in the front yard to the wreckage of her home. It was too depressing—too redolent of her son and husband—for Lila to imagine living in it, but she hadn’t been able to bring herself to move away.
The slicks of rain sliding down the interior walls glistened in the beam of her crank flashlight. The rain sounded like an ocean being stirred. From a shelf at the back of the living room, Lila picked out a damp mystery novel, and started to return the way she had come. The beam caught an odd, parchment-colored leaf, lying on the rotted seat of a stool by the kitchen counter. Lila picked it up. It was a note from Anton: the information for his “tree guy,” to deal with the Dutch Elm in the backyard.
She studied the note for a long time, stunned by it, by the sudden closeness of that other life—her real life? her previous life?—which appeared like a child darting out between parked cars and into traffic.
5
The exploration party had been gone a week when Celia Frode returned on foot, splattered in mud from head to toe. She was alone.
6
Celia said that beyond Dooling Correctional, in the direction of the little neighboring town of Maylock, the roads had become impassable; every tree they cleared from the highway only got them a few yards before they came to the next one. It was easier to leave the golf carts and hike.
There was no one in Maylock when they got there, and no sign of recent life. The buildings and houses were like the ones in Dooling—overgrown, in states of greater and lesser disrepair, a few burned by fires—and the road above Dorr’s Hollow Stream, which was now a swollen river with sunken cars for shoals, had collapsed. Probably they should have turned around then, Celia conceded. They’d scavenged useful supplies from the grocery store and other businesses in Maylock. But they got to talking about the movie theater in the small town of Eagle that was another ten miles off, and how great it would be for the kids if they came back with a film projector. Magda had assured them that their big generator would be up to such tasks.
“They still had that new Star Wars movie playing there,” Celia said, and added, wryly, “You know, Sheriff, the one where the girl’s the hero.”
Lila didn’t correct the “Sheriff.” It had turned out to be remarkably difficult to quit being a cop. “Go on, Celia.”
The exploring party crossed the Dorr’s Hollow Stream at a bridge that was still intact, and picked up a mountain road called Lion Head Way that seemed to offer a shortcut to Eagle. The map they’d been using—borrowed from the remains of the Dooling Public Library—showed an old, unnamed coal company road curling off near the top of the mountain. The company road could take them to the interstate, and from there the going would be easy. But the map turned out to be outdated. Lion Head Way now dead-ended at a plateau, where stood that dreary place of male incarceration called Lion Head Prison. The company road they had been hoping to find had been plowed under during the construction of the prison.
Because it was late in the day, rather than attempt to backtrack the narrow, broken decline off the mountain in the dark, they had decided to camp at the prison, and start fresh in the morning.
Lila was all too familiar with Lion Head Prison; it was the maximum security facility where she had anticipated the Griner brothers would spend the next twenty-five or so years.
Janice Coates, also present for Celia’s retelling, had a brief verdict on the prison. “That place. Nasty.”
The Head, as it was called by the men imprisoned there, had been in the media a great deal before Aurora, a rare story of successful land reclamation on the site of a mountaintop removal. After Ulysses Energy Solutions finished deforesting and blasting away the top of the mountain to mine the coal beneath, it “restored” the land by pulling debris up and flattening it out. The oft-promoted idea was that, instead of viewing the mountaintops as “destroyed,” the public ought to see them as having been “opened up.” Newly flattened land was newly buildable land. Although the majority of the state’s population supported the coal industry, few failed to recognize this for the bunkum it was. These wonderfully useful new plateaus were generally situated in the middle of nowhere and often came attended by impoundments of slurry waste or chemical containment ponds, which were not the sort of neighbors anyone wanted.
But a prison was uniquely suitable for backwoods reclamation. And no one had been particularly concerned about the possible environmental dangers that its residents might face. That was how Lion Head Mountain had become the setting for Lion Head Maximum Security Prison.
The prison gate, Celia said, had been open, and the front doors, too. She, Millie, Nell Seeger, and the others had gone in. Most of the exploration party from Our Place consisted of recently released prison inmates and personnel, and they were curious about how the other half had lived. All things being equal, it was pretty comfortable. As much as it reeked from being shut up, and although there were some fissures in the floors and walls, it was dry; and the gear in every cell looked new. “Some déjà vu,” conceded Celia, “but kind of funny, too, you know.”
Their last night had been calm. In the morning, Celia had trekked down the mountain a ways, searching for a trail that might cut off some of the hike and save them having to go all the way down the longer, circuitous route to Eagle. To Celia’s surprise, she’d received a call on her toy walkie-talkie.
“Celia! We think we see someone!” It was Nell.
“What?” Celia had replied. “Say again?”
“We’re inside! Inside the prison! The windows at the end of their version of Broadway are all fogged, but there’s a woman in one of the solitary confinement cells! She’s lying under a yellow blanket! It looks like she’s moving! Millie’s trying to find a way to get the door to release without the power so—” That’s where the transmission ended.
A vast rumble in the earth startled Celia. She held out her hands, trying to balance. The toy walkie flew out of her hand and shattered on the ground.
Returning to the top of the road, lungs burning and legs shaking, Celia went through the prison gate. Powder sifted through the air like snow; she had to cover her mouth to keep from choking. What she saw was hard to process, and even harder to accept. The terrain was shattered, heaved up in clefts as if in the aftermath of an earthquake. Displaced dirt hung in the air. Celia stumbled to her knees several times, eyes slitted almost shut, reaching for anything solid. Gradually, the rectangular shape of the Lion Head intake unit, two stories high, emerged, and then nothing else. There was no more land behind the intake unit, and no more prison. The plateau had crumbled and given way. The new max security facility had gone down the back of the mountain like a great stone child down a slide. Intake was now no more than a film prop, all front and no back.
Celia didn’t dare go all the way to the edge to look down, but she glimpsed a few pieces of wreckage far below: massive cement blocks jumbled at the foot, amid a swamp of dust particles.
“So I came back by myself,” said Celia, “as fast as I could.”
She inhaled and scratched a clean place in the mud on her cheek. The listeners, a dozen women who had hurried to their meeting place at the Shopwell when word spread that she was back, were silent. The others weren’t going to return.
“I recall reading that there was some controversy about the fill under that overgrown jailhouse,” said Janice. “Something about how the ground was too soft for the weight. People saying the coal company cut corners when they were packing it down. State engineers were looking into it . . .”
Celia let her breath go, a long sigh, and continued absently. “Nell and I always kept it casual. I didn’t expect it to last outside of prison.” She sniffed—just once. “So I probably shouldn’t feel so blue, but there it is: I feel blue as hell.”
There was silence. Then Lila said, “I need to go there.”
Tiffany Jones said, “Want company?”
7
What they were doing was foolish, Coates said.
“Fucking foolish, Lila. To go off and play around in an avalanche.” She had walked with Lila and Tiffany Jones as far as Ball’s Hill Road. The two expeditionaries were leading a pair of horses.
“We’re not going to play around in an avalanche,” Lila said. “We’re going to play around in the wreckage from an avalanche.”
“And see if someone is still alive in there,” Tiffany added.
“Are you kidding?” Janice’s nose was beet-red in the cold. She appeared ever more oracular, her white hair floating out behind her, the color in her rawboned cheeks as bright as road flares. All that was missing was the gnarled staff and a bird of prey to perch on her shoulder. “They went down the side of a mountain, and the prison landed on top of them. They’re dead. And if they saw a woman in there, she’s dead, too.”
“I know that,” said Lila. “But if they did see a woman in Lion Head, it means there are other women outside of Dooling. Knowing we’re not alone in this world, Janice . . . that would be huge.”
“Don’t die,” the warden called after them as they rode up Ball’s Hill. Lila said, “That’s the plan,” and beside her, Tiffany Jones chimed in, more conclusively, “We won’t.”
8
Tiffany had ridden all through her girlhood. Her family had run an apple orchard with a playground, goats to feed, a hotdog stand, and a pony ride. “I used to ride all the time, but . . . there was some other stuff with the family—downsides, you could say. It wasn’t all ponies. I started to run into some trouble and got out of the habit.”
This trouble was no mystery to Lila, who had personally arrested Tiff more than once. That Tiffany Jones bore startlingly little resemblance to this one. The woman who rode astride the massive roan beside Lila’s smaller white mare was a full-faced, auburn-haired woman in a white cowboy hat that would have suited any John Ford rancher. She had a self-possession about her that was utterly unlike the wretched drug addict Truman Mayweather had regularly tuned up on in the trailer next to his meth lab so long ago, and so far away.
And she was pregnant. Lila had heard Tiffany mention it at a Meeting. That, Lila thought, was where at least part of her glow came from.
It was dusk. They would have to stop soon. Maylock was visible, a spread of dim dark buildings in a valley a couple of miles distant. The exploring party had been there, and found no one, male or female. It seemed that only Dooling held human life. Unless there really had been a woman in the men’s prison, that was.
“You seem like you’re doing pretty well,” said Lila carefully. “Now.”
Tiffany’s laugh was amiable. “The afterlife clears your mind. I don’t want dope, if that’s what you mean.”
“Is that what you think this is? The afterlife?”
“Not really,” said Tiffany, and didn’t pick the subject up again until they were lying in their sleeping bags in the shell of a gas station that had been abandoned in the other world, too.
Tiffany said, “I mean, the afterlife, it’s supposed to be heaven or hell, right?” They could see the horses through the plate glass, tied up to the old pumps. The moonlight gave their coats a sheen.
“I’m not religious,” Lila said.
“Me neither,” Tiffany said. “Anyway, there’s no angels and no devils, so go figure. But isn’t this some kinda miracle?”
Lila thought of Jessica and Roger Elway. Their baby, Platinum, was growing fast, crawling all over the place. (Elaine Nutting’s daughter, Nana, had fallen in love with Plat—an ugly nickname, but everyone used it; the kid would probably hate them for it later—and rolled her everywhere in a rusty baby carriage.) Lila thought of Essie and Candy. She thought of her husband and her son and her whole life that was no longer her life.
“Some kind,” Lila said. “I guess.”
“I’m sorry. Miracle’s the wrong word. I’m just saying we’re doin all right, right? So it’s not hell, right? I’m clean. I feel good. I got these wonderful horses, which I never in my wildest dreams imagined could happen. Someone like me, takin care of animals like these? Never.” Tiffany frowned. “I’m making this all about me, aren’t I? I know you’ve lost a lot. I know most everybody here has lost a lot, and I’m just someone who didn’t have nothing to lose.”
“I’m glad for you.” She was, too. Tiffany Jones had deserved something better.
9
They skirted Maylock and rode along the banks of the swollen Dorr’s Hollow Stream. In the woods, a pack of dogs gathered on a hummock to observe them as they passed. There were six or seven of them, shepherds and Labs, tongues out, breath steaming. Lila took out her pistol. Beneath her, the white mare rolled its head and shifted its gait.
“No, no,” Tiffany said. She reached a hand across and brushed the mare’s ear. Her voice was soft but steady, not cooing. “Lila’s not gonna shoot that gun.”
“She’s not?” Lila had an eye on the dog in the middle. The animal’s fur was a bristly gray and black. It had mismatched eyes, blue and yellow, and its mouth seemed especially large. She wasn’t a person who typically let her imagination run away from her, but she thought the dog looked rabid.
“She certainly isn’t. They want to chase us. But we’re just doing our thing. We don’t want to play chase. We’re just getting along.” Tiffany’s voice was airy and certain. Lila thought that if Tiffany didn’t know what she was doing, she believed she knew what she was doing. They paced along through the underbrush. The dogs didn’t follow.
“You were right,” Lila said later. “Thanks.”
Tiffany said she was welcome. “But it wasn’t for you. No offense, but I’m not lettin you put a fright in my horses, Sheriff.”
10
They crossed the river and bypassed the high road the others had taken up the mountain, continuing instead on the lower ground. The horses descended into a dell that formed the gap between what was left of Lion Head on the left and another cliff face on the right, which rose up at a sharp, splintery slant. There was a pervasive metallic stench that tickled the backs of their throats. Crumbles of loose earth shook down, the embedded stones echoing far too loudly in the bowl created by the rises on either side.
They tied up the horses a couple of hundred yards from the prison ruins and approached on foot.
“A woman from somewhere else,” Tiffany said. “Wouldn’t that be something?”
“Yes,” Lila agreed. “Finding some of our own still alive would be even better.”
Fragments of masonry, some as tall and wide as moving vans, were embedded higher up along the back of Lion Head, stabbed into the earth like enormous cenotaphs. As sturdy as they appeared, Lila could easily imagine them breaking loose under their own weight and tumbling down to join the pile at the bottom.
The body of the prison had hit bottom and folded inward on itself, forming a vaguely pyramid-like shape. In a way, it was impressive, how much of the building’s body had survived the slide down the mountain—and hideous, too, in its decipherability, like a dollhouse smashed by a bully. Spears of jagged steel jutted out from the cement, and massive root-knotted clods of earth had settled on other parts of the debris. At the edges of this unplanned new structure were tattered breaches in the cement that offered glimpses of the black interior. Everywhere there were smashed trees, twenty- and thirty-footers snapped into raw shards.
Lila put on a surgical mask that she’d brought. “Stay here, Tiffany.”
“I wanna come with you. I’m not afraid. Let me have one a them.” She stuck out her hand for a surgical mask.
“I know you’re not afraid. I just want someone able to go back if this place falls in on my head, and you’re the horse girl. I’m just a middle-aged ex-cop. Also, we both know you’re living for two.”
At the nearest opening, Lila paused to wave. Tiffany didn’t see it; she’d walked back to the horses.
11
Light filtered into the interior of the prison in sabers punched through the smashed concrete. Lila found herself walking atop a wall, stepping on the closed steel doors of cells. Everything was turned one-quarter. The ceiling was on her right. What would have been the left wall was now the ceiling, and the floor was on her left. She had to lower her head to slip under an open cell door that hung down like a trap. She heard ticking noises, dripping noises. Her boots crunched against stone and glass.
A clog composed of rock, shattered pipes, and chunks of insulation obstructed her forward progress. She flicked her flashlight around. A-Level was stenciled in red paint on the wall above her head. Lila backtracked to where the door hung. She jumped and grabbed the doorframe, hoisting herself up into the cell. A hole had broken open in the wall on the opposite side of the hanging door. Lila made her way—carefully—to the breach. She crouched and ducked her way through. Serrations of broken concrete snagged at the back of her shirt, and the fabric tore.
Clint’s voice came to her, inquiring if maybe—just maybe, and don’t take this as an accusation, please—there was a risk-reward ratio that needed to be reconsidered here?
Let’s unpack it, shall we, Lila? The risk is that you are climbing into an unsettled wreck at the bottom of an unsettled mountain. Also, there are goddam wild, deranged-looking dogs out there, and a pregnant drug addict waiting—or not waiting—with the horses. And you are—again, no criticism, merely setting down the facts, darling—forty-five. Everyone knows that the prime age for a woman to crawl around unsettled and volatile ruins is from her late teens to her late twenties. You’re out of the target group. It all adds up to a significant risk of death, horrible death, or unimaginably horrible death.
In the next cell, Lila had to climb over a battered steel toilet, then slip down through another hole in the floor that had been the right wall. Her ankle bent funny when it hit the bottom, and she grabbed for purchase. Something metal slashed her hand.
The wound on her palm was a deep red gash. It probably needed a stitch or two. She ought to turn back, get some ointment and a proper bandage from the first aid kit that they’d brought.
Instead, Lila ripped off a piece of her shirt and wrapped her hand. She used the flashlight to find another stencil on the wall: Secure Wing. This was good. That sounded like exactly the place where they’d seen the woman in the cell. What was bad was that the new hall was situated above her head, a shaft going upward. What was worse was the leg in one canted corner, raggedly severed two inches above the knee. It was clad in green corduroy. Nell Seeger had been wearing green cords when the expedition had left for Eagle.
“I’m not going to tell Tiff about this,” Lila said. Hearing herself speaking out loud both startled and comforted her. “It would do no good.”
Lila pointed her beam upward. The Lion Head’s secure wing had become a great wide chimney. She shone the light from side to side, looking for a way to go, and thought she might see one. The ceiling of the wing had been of the drop-panel type; the panels had all shaken loose in the slide, but the steel gridding remained in place. It resembled a trellis. Or a ladder.
As for the reward, Clint offered, you might find someone. Might. But be honest with yourself. You know that this wreck is empty, just like the rest of the world. There’s nothing to be found but the bodies of the women who went with Nell. Let that one severed leg stand for all of them. If there were other women in the world you’re calling Our Place, they would have made themselves known by now. They would at least have left some trace. What is it you think you have to prove? That women can be Marlboro Men, too?
It seemed that even in her imagination, he couldn’t just tell her he was afraid for her. He couldn’t stop treating her like one of his incarcerated patients, throwing leading questions like dodgeballs in a playground game.
“Go away, Clint,” she said, and for a wonder, he did.
Lila reached up and grabbed the lowest trellis of ceiling gridding. The crosspiece bowed, but didn’t break. Her hand sang and she felt blood leaking around the edges of her rag bandage—but she hung on and pulled herself up, and upright. She braced her boot on the crosspiece and pushed down. It bowed again—and held. Lila reached up, pulled, stepped. She began to ascend the ladder of gridding. Each time she came to the level of a cell door, Lila used her good left hand to hang on while she swung out in the air, shining the flashlight with her hurt right. There was no woman to be seen through the wired glass at the top of the first cell door, no woman in the second, no woman in the third; all she saw were bed frames sticking out from what had been the floors. Her hand pulsed. The blood was dripping down inside her sleeve. Nothing in the fourth cell and she had to stop and rest, but not for too long, and definitely no looking down into the darkness. Was there a trick to this kind of effort? Something that Jared had mentioned about cross-country, something to tell yourself? Oh, right, now she had it. “When my lungs start tightening up,” Jared had said, “I just pretend there are girls checking me out, and I can’t let them down.”
That wasn’t much use. She’d just have to keep going.
Lila climbed. The fifth cell contained just a cot, a sink, and a dangling toilet. Nothing more.
She had arrived at a T. Off to the left, across the channel, the length of another hall stretched away. Far off, at the end of the hall, the beam of Lila’s flashlight found what appeared to be a pile of laundry—a body or bodies, she thought, the remains of the other explorers. Was that Nell Seeger’s puffy red jacket? Lila wasn’t sure, but as cold as it was, she could smell the beginnings of decomp. They had been tossed around until they snapped and then probably tossed around some more. There was nothing to do but leave them there.
Something moved amid the pile and she heard squeaking. The prison’s rats had survived the tumult, it seemed.
Lila climbed some more. Each metal grid seemed to give more under her weight, creaking longer and higher with every push-off. The sixth cell was empty and so were the seventh and the eighth and the ninth. It’s always the last place you check, isn’t it? It’s always on the top shelf of the closet at the very back. It’s always the bottom file in the stack. It’s always in the littlest, least-used pocket of the knapsack.
If she fell now, at least she’d die instantaneously.
You always—always, always, always—fall from the topmost grid of the ceiling that you’re using for a ladder in the hall of the maximum security prison that has gone sliding down the unstable remains of a former coal mountain.
But she decided she was not going to quit now. She had killed Jessica Elway to defend herself. She had been the first female police sheriff in the history of Dooling County. She had clapped handcuffs on the Griner brothers, and when Low Griner had told her to go fuck herself, she had laughed in his face. A few more feet wasn’t going to stop her.
And it didn’t.
She leaned out into the dark, swinging free as if unfurled by a dance partner, and cast the beam of her flashlight through the window of the tenth cell door.
The blow-up doll had come to rest with its face against the glass. Its cherry red lips were a bow of surprise, made for fellatio; its eyes were a thoughtless and seductive Betty Boop blue. A draft from somewhere caused it to nod its empty head and shrug its pink shoulders. A sticker on its head was printed with the label, Happy 40th Birthday, Larry!
12
“Come on now, Lila,” said Tiffany. Her voice drifted up from the well. “Just take one step and then worry about the next step.”
“Okay,” Lila managed. She was glad that Tiffany hadn’t listened to her. In fact, she didn’t know if there were many things she’d ever been so glad about. Her throat was dry; her body felt too tight in her skin; her hand was burning. The voice below was another life, though. This dark ladder didn’t have to be the end.
“That’s good. Now: one step,” said Tiffany. “You just gotta go one step. That’s how you start.”
13
“A blow-up fuck-me doll,” Tiffany marveled later. “Some a-hole’s birthday present. They let em have shit like that?”
Lila shrugged. “All I know is what I saw. There’s probably a story, but we’ll never know it.”
They rode all day and into the dark. Tiffany wanted one of the women in Our Place who’d had nursing experience to clean up Lila’s hand pronto. Lila said she’d be okay, but Tiff was insistent. “I told that crone who used to be warden up at the prison we wouldn’t die. We. That means both of us.”
She told Lila about the apartment she had in Charlottesville before meth addiction had napalmed the last decade or so. She’d kept a shitload of ferns. Buggers had flourished, too.
“That’s livin right, when you got big houseplants,” Tiffany said.
Slumped low in her saddle, the pace of her horse rocking her so pleasantly, Lila had to fight to keep from falling asleep and possibly slipping off. “What?”
“My ferns,” said Tiffany. “I’m regalin you about my ferns to keep you from passing out on me.”
This made Lila feel giggly but all that came out was a moan. Tiffany said not to be sad. “We can get you some. Ferns all over the fuckin place. They ain’t rare.”
Later, Lila asked Tiffany if she was hoping for a boy or a girl.
“Just a healthy kid,” said Tiffany. “Either way, so long as it’s healthy.”
“How about if it’s a girl, you name her ‘Fern.’ ”
Tiffany laughed. “That’s the spirit!”
Dooling appeared at dawn, the buildings floating through a blue haze. Smoke twisted up from the parking lot behind the remains of the Squeaky Wheel. Here a communal firepit had been set up. Electricity was still at a premium, so they cooked outside as much as possible. (The Squeak had proved an excellent source of fuel. Its roof and walls were slowly being dismantled.)
Tiffany led them toward the fire. There were a dozen women there, shapeless in their heavy coats, caps, and mittens. Two big pots of coffee were boiling over the wide fire.
“Welcome home. We got coffee.” Coates stepped from the group.
“Unlike us, we got nothing,” Lila said. “Sorry. It was a Fuck-Me Farrah doll in the secure wing. If there’s anybody else in this world, there’s still no sign of them. And the others . . .” She shook her head.
“Mrs. Norcross?”
They all turned to check out the new one, who’d arrived just a day earlier. Lila took a step toward her, then stopped. “Mary Pak? Is that you?”
Mary came to Lila and hugged her. “I was just with Jared, Mrs. Norcross. I thought you’d want to know, he’s all right. Or he was, the last I saw him. That was in the attic of the demo house over in your neighborhood, before I fell asleep.”