CHAPTER 9
1
The fox comes to Lila in a dream. She knows it’s a dream because the fox can talk.
“Hey, babe,” he says as he pads into the bedroom of the house on St. George Street she’s now sharing with Tiffany, Janice Coates, and two of the docs from the Women’s Center—Erin Eisenberg and Jolie Suratt. (Erin and Jolie are unmarried. The third Women’s Center doctor, Georgia Peekins, lives on the other side of town, with two daughters who sorely miss their big brother.) Another reason to know this is a dream is that she’s alone in the room. The other twin bed, where Tiffany sleeps, is empty and neatly made up.
The fox puts its cunning forepaws—white rather than red, as if he has walked through fresh paint to get here—on the quilt that covers her.
“What do you want?” Lila asks.
“To show you the way back,” the fox says. “But only if you want to go.”
2
When Lila opened her eyes, it was morning. Tiffany was in the other bed where she belonged, the blankets pushed down to her knees, her belly a half-moon above the boxer shorts she slept in. She was over seven months now.
Instead of going to the kitchen to brew up a nasty-tasting mess of the chicory that served them as coffee in this version of Dooling, Lila went straight down the hall and opened the front door to a pleasant spring morning. (Time passed with such slippery limberness here; watches kept ordinary time, but there was really nothing ordinary about it.) The fox was there as she’d known it would be, sitting on the weed-choked slate path with its brush of a tail curled neatly around its paws. It regarded Lila with bright interest.
“Hey, babe,” Lila said. The fox cocked its head and seemed to smile. Then it trotted down the path to the broken street and sat again. Watching her. Waiting.
Lila went to wake Tiffany up.
3
In the end, seventeen residents of Our Place followed the fox in six of the solar-powered golf carts, a caravan trundling slowly out of town and then along what had been Route 31 toward Ball’s Hill. Tiffany rode in the lead cart along with Janice and Lila, grousing the whole way about not being allowed to ride her horse. This had been nixed by Erin and Jolie, who were concerned about the strength of Tiff’s contractions when she still had six or eight weeks to go. This much they had told the mom-to-be herself. What they hadn’t passed on (although Lila and Janice knew) were their worries for the baby, which had been conceived while Tiffany was still using drugs on a daily—sometimes hourly—basis.
Mary Pak, Magda Dubcek, the four members of the First Thursday Book Club, and five erstwhile Dooling Correctional inmates were going. Also along was Elaine Nutting, formerly Geary. She rode with the two lady docs. Her daughter had wanted to come, but Elaine had put her foot down and kept it down even when tears began to flow. Nana had been left with old Mrs. Ransom and her granddaughter. The two girls had become fast friends, but not even the prospect of spending a day with Molly had cheered Nana up. She wanted to follow the fox, she said, because it was like something out of a fairy tale. She wanted to draw it.
“Stay with your little girl, if you want,” Lila had told Elaine. “We’ve got plenty of people.”
“What I want is to see what that thing wants,” Elaine had replied. Although in truth, she didn’t know if she did or not. The fox—now sitting in front of the slumped ruin of Pearson’s Barber Shop and waiting patiently for the women to assemble and get moving—filled her with a sense of foreboding, unfocused but strong.
“Come on!” Tiffany called grumpily. “Before I need to pee again!”
And so they followed the fox as it trotted out of town along the faded white line in the center of the highway, occasionally looking back to make sure his troop was still there. Seeming to grin. Seeming almost to say, There sure are some fine-looking women in the audience today.
It was an outing—a strange one, granted, but still a day off from their various chores and jobs—and there should have been talking and laughter, but the women in the trundling line of golf carts were almost silent. The headlamps of the carts came on when they were rolling, and as they went past the jungle that had once been Adams Lumberyard, the thought came to Lila that they looked more like a funeral cortege than gals on an outing.
When the fox left the highway for an overgrown track a quarter mile past the lumberyard, Tiffany stiffened and put her hands protectively on her belly. “No, no, no, you can stop right here and let me out. I ain’t going back to Tru Mayweather’s trailer, not even if it ain’t no more than a pile of scrap metal.”
“That’s not where we’re going,” Lila said.
“How do you know?”
“Wait and see.”
As it turned out, the remains of the trailer were barely visible; a storm had knocked it off its blocks and it lay on its side in high weeds and brambles like a rusty dinosaur. Thirty or forty yards from it, the fox cut left and slipped into the woods. The women in the two lead carts saw a ruddy orange flash of fur, then it vanished.
Lila dismounted and went to where it had entered the woods. The ruins of the nearby shed had been entirely overgrown, but even after all this time, a sallow chemical smell remained. The meth may be gone, Lila thought, but the memories linger on. Even here, where time seems to gallop, pause for breath, then gallop again.
Janice, Magda, and Blanche McIntyre joined her. Tiffany remained in the golf cart, holding her belly. She looked ill.
“There’s a game trail,” Lila said, pointing. “We can follow it without much trouble.”
“I’m not goin in those woods, either,” Tiffany said. “I don’t care if that fox does a tap dance. I’m havin goddam contractions again.”
“You wouldn’t be going even if you weren’t having them,” Erin said. “I’ll stay with you. Jolie, you can go, if you want.”
Jolie did. The fifteen women went up the game trail in single file, Lila in the lead and the former Mrs. Frank Geary bringing up the rear. They had been walking for almost ten minutes when Lila stopped and raised her arms, index fingers pointing both left and right like a traffic cop who can’t make up her mind.
“Holy shit,” Celia Frode said. “I never seen nothing like that. Never.”
The branches of the poplars, birches, and alders on either side were furred with moths. There seemed to be millions of them.
“What if they attack?” Elaine murmured, keeping her voice low and thanking God that she hadn’t given in to Nana’s demands to be brought along.
“They won’t,” Lila said.
“How can you know that?” Elaine demanded.
“I just do,” Lila said. “They’re like the fox.” She hesitated, searching for the right word. “They’re emissaries.”
“For who?” Blanche asked. “Or what?”
This was another question Lila chose not to answer, although she could have. “Come on,” she said. “Not far now.”
4
Fifteen women stood in thigh-high grass, staring at what Lila had come to think of as the Amazing Tree. No one said anything for perhaps thirty seconds. Then, in a high, gasping voice, Jolie Suratt said, “My good God in heaven.”
The Tree rose like a living pylon in the sun, its various knotted trunks weaving around each other, sometimes concentrating shafts of sunlight filled with dusty pollen, sometimes creating dark caves. Tropical birds disported among its many branches and gossiped in its ferny leaves. In front of it, the peacock Lila had seen before strutted back and forth like the world’s most elegant doorman. The red snake was there, too, hanging from a branch, a reptilian trapeze artist penduluming lazily back and forth. Below the snake was a dark crevasse where the various boles seemed to draw back. Lila didn’t remember this, but she wasn’t surprised. Nor was she when the fox popped out of it like Jack from his box and took a playful snap at the peacock, who paid him no mind.
Janice Coates took Lila’s arm. “Are we seeing this?”
“Yes,” Lila said.
Celia, Magda, and Jolie screamed shrilly, in piercing three-part harmony. The white tiger was emerging from the split in the many-boled trunk. It surveyed the women at the edge of the clearing with its green eyes, then stretched long and low, seeming almost to bow to them.
“Stand still!” Lila shouted. “Stand still, all of you! It won’t harm you!” Hoping with all her heart and soul that it was true.
The tiger touched noses with the fox. It turned to the women again, seeming to fix on Lila with particular interest. Then it paced around the Tree and out of sight.
“My God,” Kitty McDavid said. She was weeping. “How beautiful was that? How fucking oh-my-God beautiful was that?”
Magda Dubcek said, “This is svaté místo. Holy place.” And she crossed herself.
Janice was looking at Lila. “Tell me.”
“I think,” Lila said, “it’s a way out. A way back. If we want it.”
That was when the walkie-talkie on her belt came to life. There was a burst of static, and no way to make out words. But it sounded like Erin to Lila, and it sounded like she was yelling.
5
Tiffany was stretched across the front seat of the golf cart. An old St. Louis Rams tee-shirt that she had scrounged somewhere lay crumpled on the ground. Her breasts, once little more than nubbins, jutted skyward in a plain D-cup cotton bra. (The Lycra ones were now totally useless.) Erin was bent between her legs with her hands splayed on that amazing mound of belly. As the women came running, some brushing twigs and the odd moth from their hair, Erin bore down. Tiffany shrieked—“Stop that, oh for God’s sake stop!”—and her legs shot out in a V.
“What are you doing?” Lila asked, reaching her, but when she looked down, what Erin was doing and why she was doing it became obvious. Tiff’s jeans were unzipped. There was a stain on the blue denim and the cotton of Tiff’s underpants was a damp pink.
“The baby is coming, and its butt is where its head should be,” Erin said.
“Oh my God, a breech?” Kitty said.
“I have to turn it around,” Erin said. “Get us back to town, Lila.”
“We’ll have to straighten her up,” Lila said. “I can’t drive until you do that.”
With the help of Jolie and Blanche McIntyre, Lila got Tiffany to a half-sitting position with Erin crammed in next to her. Tiffany screamed again. “Oh, that hurts!”
Lila slid behind the wheel of the cart, her right shoulder tight against Tiffany’s left one. Erin had turned almost sideways to fit. “How fast will this thing go?” she asked.
“I don’t know, but we’re going to find out.” Lila hit the accelerator pedal, wincing at Tiff’s howl of pain as the cart jerked forward. Tiffany screamed at every jounce, and there were a lot of jounces. At that moment, the Amazing Tree with its freight of exotic birds was the farthest thing from Lila Norcross’s mind.
This was not true of the former Elaine Geary.
6
They stopped at the Olympia Diner. Tiffany was in too much pain to go further. Erin sent Janice and Magda back to town to get her bag while Lila and three other women carried Tiffany inside.
“Pull a couple of the tables together,” said Erin, “and do it fast. I need to straighten this baby out now, and I need Mom lying down to do it.”
Lila and Mary pushed over the tables. Margaret and Gail hefted Tiffany atop them, grimacing and turning their faces away, as if she were throwing mud at them instead of screams of objection.
Erin went back to work on Tiffany’s stomach, kneading it like dough. “I think it’s starting to move, praise God. Come on, Junior, how about a little somersault for Dr. E.?”
Erin bore down on Tiff’s stomach with one hand while Jolie Suratt pushed sideways.
“Stop!” Tiffany screamed. “Stop it, you fuckers!”
“It’s turning,” said Erin, ignoring the profanity. “Really turning, thank God. Yank her pants off, Lila. Pants and underpants. Jolie, keep pressing. Don’t let it turn back.”
Lila took one leg of Tiffany’s jeans, Celia Frode the other. They yanked and the old denims came off. Tiffany’s underpants came with them part way, leaving brushstrokes of blood and amniotic fluid on her thighs. Lila pulled them the rest of the way. They were heavy with liquid, warm and sopping. She felt her gorge rise, then settle back into place.
The screams were constant now, Tiffany’s head lashing from side to side.
“I can’t wait for the bag,” Erin said. “This baby is coming right now. Only . . .” She looked at her former office-mate, who nodded. “Somebody get Jolie a knife. A sharp one. We have to cut her a little.”
“I-gotta-push,” Tiffany panted.
“The hell you do,” Jolie said. “Not yet. The door’s open, but we need to take the hinges off. Make a little more room.”
Lila found a steak knife, and in the bathroom, an ancient bottle of hydrogen peroxide. She doused the blade, stopped to consider the hand sanitizer by the door, and tried it. Nothing. The stuff inside had evaporated long ago. She hurried back. The women had surrounded Tiffany, Erin, and Jolie in a semi-circle. All were holding hands except for Elaine Geary, who had her arms wrapped tightly around her midsection. She was directing her gaze first to the counter, then to the empty booths, then out the door. Anywhere but at the panting, screaming woman on the makeshift operating table, now mother-naked save for an old cotton bra.
Jolie took the knife. “Did you disinfect it with something?”
“Hydrogen per—”
“That’ll do,” Erin said. “Mary, find me a Styrofoam cooler if there’s one around. One of you other ladies, get towels. There’ll be some in the kitchen. Put them on top of the—”
A miserable howl from Tiffany as Jolie Suratt performed a steak-knife episiotomy, sans anesthetic.
“Put the towels on top of the golf carts,” Erin finished.
“Oh yeah, the solar panels!” That was Kitty. “To heat em up. Hey, that’s pretty sma—”
“We want them warm but not hot,” Erin said. “I have no intention of roasting our newest citizen. Go on.”
Elaine stood where she was, letting the other women wash around her like water around a rock, continuing to direct her gaze at any object that was not Tiffany Jones. Her eyes were shiny and shallow.
“How close is she?” Lila asked.
“Seven centimeters,” Jolie said. “She’ll be at ten before you can say Jack Robinson. Cervical effacement is complete—one thing that went right, at least. Push, Tiffany. Save a little for next time, though.”
Tiffany pushed. Tiffany screamed. Tiffany’s vagina flexed, then closed, then opened again. Fresh blood flowed between her legs.
“I don’t like the blood.” Lila heard Erin mutter this to Jolie from the side of her mouth, like a racetrack tout passing on a hot tip. “There’s way too much. Christ, I wish I at least had my fetoscope.”
Mary came back with the sort of hard plastic cooler Lila had toted to Maylock Lake many times, when she and Clint and Jared used to go on picnics there. Printed on the side was BUDWEISER! THE KING OF BEERS! “Will this do, Dr. E.?”
“Fine,” Erin said, but didn’t look up. “Okay, Tiff, big push.”
“My back is killing me—” Tiffany said, but me became meeeeeeeEEEEEEE as her face contorted and her fists beat up and down on the chipped Formica of the tabletop.
“I see its head!” Lila shouted. “I see its fa—oh, Christ, Erin, what—?”
Erin pushed Jolie aside and seized one of the baby’s shoulders before it could retreat, her fingertips pressing deep in a way that made Lila feel ill. The baby’s head slid forward tilted strenuously to one side, as if it was trying to look back to where it had come from. The eyes were shut, the face ashy gray. Looped around the neck and up one cheek toward the ear—like a hangman’s noose—was a blood-spotted umbilical cord that made Lila think of the red snake hanging from the Amazing Tree. From the chest down, the infant was still inside its mother, but one arm had slithered free and hung down limply. Lila could see each perfect finger, each perfect nail.
“Quit pushing,” Erin said. “I know you want to finish it, but don’t push yet.”
“I need to,” Tiffany rasped.
“You’ll strangle your baby if you do,” Jolie said. She was back beside Erin, shoulder to shoulder. “Wait. Just . . . just give me a second . . .”
Too late, thought Lila. It’s already strangled. You only have to look at that gray face.
Jolie worked one finger beneath the umbilical cord, then two. She flexed the fingers in a come-on gesture, first pulling the cord away from the infant’s neck and then slipping it off. Tiffany screamed, every tendon in her neck standing out in stark relief.
“Push!” Erin said. “Just as hard as you can! On three! Jolie, don’t let it face-plant on this filthy fucking floor when it comes! Tiff! One, two, three!”
Tiffany pushed. The baby seemed to shoot into Jolie Suratt’s hands. It was slimy, it was beautiful, and it was dead.
“Straw!” Jolie shouted. “Get a straw! Now!”
Elaine stepped forward. Lila hadn’t seen her move. She already had one ready, the paper stripped off. “Here.”
Erin took the straw. “Lila,” Erin said. “Open his mouth.”
His. Until then, Lila hadn’t noticed the tiny gray comma below the baby’s stomach.
“Open his mouth!” Erin repeated.
Carefully, Lila used two fingers to do as she was told. Erin put one end of the straw in her own mouth and the other in the tiny opening Lila’s fingers had created.
“Now push up on his chin,” Jolie instructed. “Gotta create suction.”
What point? Dead was dead. But Lila once more obeyed orders, and saw shadowy crescents appear in Erin Eisenberg’s cheeks as she sucked on her end. There was an audible sound—flup. Erin turned her head aside to spit out what looked like a wad of phlegm. Then she nodded to Jolie, who raised the baby to her face and blew gently into its mouth.
The baby just lay there, head back, beads of blood and foam on its bald head. Jolie blew again, and a miracle happened. The tiny chest heaved; the blue eyes popped sightlessly open. He began to wail. Celia Frode started the applause, and the others joined in . . . except for Elaine, who had retreated to where she was earlier, her arms once again clasping her midsection. The baby’s cries were constant now. Its hands made tiny fists.
“That’s my baby,” Tiffany said, and raised her arms. “My baby is crying. Give him to me.”
Jolie tied off the umbilical cord with a rubber band and wrapped the baby in the first thing that came to hand—a waitress’s apron someone had grabbed from a coathook. She passed the wailing bundle to Tiffany, who looked into his face, laughed, and kissed one gummy cheek.
“Where are those towels?” Erin demanded. “Get them now.”
“They won’t be too warm yet,” Kitty said.
“Get them.”
The towels were brought and Mary lined the Budweiser cooler with them. While she did, Lila saw more blood gushing from between Tiffany’s legs. A lot of blood. Pints, maybe.
“Is that normal?” someone asked.
“Perfectly.” Erin’s voice was firm and sure, confidence personified: absolutely no problem here. That was when Lila began to suspect that Tiffany was probably going to die. “But someone bring me more towels.”
Jolie Suratt moved to take the baby from his mother and put him in the makeshift Budweiser bassinet. Erin shook her head. “Let her hold him a little longer.”
That was when Lila knew for sure.
7
Sundown in what had once been the town of Dooling and was now Our Place.
Lila was sitting on the front stoop of the house on St. George Street with a stapled sheaf of paper in her hands when Janice Coates came up the walk. When Janice sat down next to her, Lila caught a scent of juniper. From a pocket inside her quilted vest, the ex-warden removed the source: a pint bottle of Schenley’s gin. She held it out to Lila. Lila shook her head.
“Retained placenta,” Janice said. “That’s what Erin told me. No way to scrape it out, at least not in time to stop the bleeding. And none of that drug they use.”
“Pitocin,” Lila said. “I had it when Jared was born.”
They sat quiet for awhile, watching the light drain from what had been a very long day. At last Janice said, “I thought you might like some help cleaning out her stuff.”
“Already done. She didn’t have much.”
“None of us do. Which is sort of a relief, don’t you think? We learned a poem in school, something about getting and spending laying waste to all our powers. Keats, maybe.”
Lila, who had learned the same poem, knew it was Wordsworth, but said nothing. Janice returned the bottle to the pocket it had come from and brought out a relatively clean handkerchief. She used it to wipe first one of Lila’s cheeks, then the other, an action that brought back painfully sweet memories of Lila’s mother, who had done the same thing on the many occasions when her daughter, a self-confessed tomboy, had taken a tumble from her bike or her skateboard.
“I found this in the dresser where she was keeping her baby things,” Lila said, handing Janice the thin pile of pages. “It was under some nightshirts and bootees.”
On the front, Tiffany had pasted a picture of a laughing, perfectly permed mommy holding up a laughing baby in a shaft of golden sunlight. Janice was pretty sure it had been clipped from a Gerber baby food ad in an old women’s magazine—maybe Good Housekeeping. Below it, Tiffany had lettered: ANDREW JONES BOOK FOR A GOOD LIFE.
“She knew it was a boy,” Lila said. “I don’t know how she knew, but she did.”
“Magda told her. Some old wives’ tale about carrying high.”
“She must have been working on this for quite awhile, and I never saw her at it.” Lila wondered if Tiffany had been embarrassed. “Look at the first page. That’s what started the waterworks.”
Janice opened the little homemade book. Lila leaned close to her and they read it together.
10 RULES FOR GOOD LIVING
1 Be kind to others & they will be kind to you
2 Do not use drugs for fun EVER
3 If you are wrong, apologize
4 God sees what you do wrong but HE is kind & will forgive
5 Do not tell lies as that becomes a habit
6 Never whip a horse
7 Your body is your tempul so DO NOT SMOKE
8 Do not cheet, give everyone a SQUARE SHAKE
9 Be careful of the friends you choose, I was not
10 Remember your mother will always love you & you will be OKAY!
“It was the last one that really got me,” Lila said. “It still does. Give me that bottle. I guess I need a nip after all.”
Janice handed it over. Lila swallowed, grimaced, and handed it back. “How’s the baby? Okay?”
“Considering he was born six weeks shy of term, and wearing his umbilical cord for a necklace, he’s doing very well,” Janice said. “Thank God we had Erin and Jolie along, or we would have lost them both. He’s with Linda Bayer and Linda’s baby. Linda quit nursing Alex a little while ago, but as soon as she heard Andy crying, her milk came right back in. So she says. Meanwhile, we’ve got another tragedy on our hands.”
As if Tiffany wasn’t enough for one day, Lila thought, and tried to put her game face on. “Tell me.”
“Gerda Holden? Oldest of the four Holden girls? She’s disappeared.”
Which almost certainly meant something mortal had happened to her in that other world. They all accepted this as a fact now.
“How’s Clara taking it?”
“About as you’d expect,” Janice replied. “She’s half out of her mind. She and all the girls have been experiencing that weird vertigo for the last week or so—”
“So someone’s moving them around.”
Janice shrugged. “Maybe. Probably. Whatever it is, Clara’s afraid another of her girls is going to blip out of existence at any moment. Maybe all three of them. I’d be afraid, too.” She began flipping through the Andrew Jones Book for a Good Life. Every page was filled with an expansion of the 10 Rules.
“Should we talk about the Tree?” Lila asked.
Janice considered, then shook her head. “Maybe tomorrow. Tonight I just want to sleep.”
Lila, who wasn’t sure she could sleep, took Janice’s hand and squeezed it.
8
Nana had asked her mother if she could sleep over with Molly at Mrs. Ransom’s house, and Elaine gave her permission after ascertaining that it would be all right with the old lady.
“Of course,” Mrs. Ransom said. “Molly and I love Nana.”
That was good enough for the former Elaine Geary, who was for once glad to have her little girl out of the house. Nana was her dear one, her jewel—a rare point of agreement with her estranged husband, and one that had kept the marriage together longer than it might have survived otherwise—but this evening Elaine had an important errand to run. One that was more for Nana than it was for her. For all the women of Dooling, really. Some of them (Lila Norcross, for instance) might not understand that now, but they would later.
If, that was, she decided to go through with it.
The golf carts they’d taken on the expedition to that weird tree in the woods were all neatly parked in the lot behind what was left of the Municipal Building. One good thing you could say for women, she thought—one of many things—was that they usually put things away when they were done with them. Men were different. They left their possessions scattered hell to breakfast. How many times had she told Frank to put his dirty clothes in the hamper—wasn’t it enough that she washed them and ironed them, without having to pick them up, as well? And how many times did she still find them in the bathroom outside the shower, or littered across the bedroom floor? And could he be bothered to rinse a glass or wash a dish after a late night snack? No! It was as if dishes and glasses became invisible once their purpose had been served. (The fact that her husband kept his office immaculate and his animal cages spotless made such thoughtless behavior more irritating.)
Small things, you would say, and who could disagree? They were! But over the course of years, those things became a domestic version of an old Chinese torture she’d read about in a Time-Life book that she’d pulled out of a donation box at Goodwill. The Death of a Thousand Cuts, it was called. Frank’s bad temper had only been the worst and deepest of those cuts. Oh, sometimes there was a present, or a soft kiss on the back of the neck, or a dinner out (with candlelight!), but those things were just frosting on a stale and hard-to-chew cake. The Cake of Marriage! She was not prepared to say every man was the same, but the majority were, because the instincts came with the package. With the penis. A man’s home was his castle, so the saying went, and etched into the XY chromosome was a deep belief that every man was a king and every woman his serving maid.
The keys were still in the carts. Of course they were—there might be an occasional case of petty pilfering in Our Place, but there had been no real theft. That was one of the nice things about it. There were many nice things, but not everyone could be content with those things. Take all the whining and whingeing that went on at the Meetings, for instance. Nana had been at some of those meetings. She didn’t think Elaine knew, but Elaine did. A good mother monitors her child, and knows when she is being infected by bad companions with bad ideas.
Two days ago it had been Molly at their house, and the two girls had a wonderful time, first playing outside (hopscotch and jump-rope), then inside (re-decorating the large dollhouse Elaine had felt justified in liberating from the Dooling Mercantile), then outside again until the sun went down. They had eaten a huge supper, after which Molly had walked the two blocks back to her house in the gloaming. By herself. And why could she do that? Because in this world there were no predators. No pedophiles.
A happy day. And that was why Elaine was so surprised (and a bit fearful, why not admit it) when she had paused outside her daughter’s door on the way to bed and heard Nana crying.
Elaine chose a golf cart, turned the key, and toed the little round accelerator pedal. She rolled soundlessly out of the lot and down Main Street, past the dead streetlights and dark storefronts. Two miles out of town she reached a neat white building with two useless gas pumps out front. The sign on the roof proclaimed it the Dooling Country Living Store. The owner, Kabir Patel, was gone, of course, as were his three well-mannered (in public, at least) sons. His wife had been visiting her family in India when the Aurora struck, and was presumably cocooned in Mumbai or Lucknow or one of those other places.
Mr. Patel had sold a bit of everything—it was the only way to compete with the supermarket—but most of it was gone now. The liquor had disappeared first, of course; women liked to drink, and who taught them to enjoy it? Other women? Rarely.
Without pausing to look in the darkened store, Elaine drove her golf cart around to the back. Here was a long metal annex with a sign out front reading Country Living Store Auto Supply Shop Come Here First And SAVE! Mr. Patel had kept it neat, she would give him points for that. Elaine’s father had done small-engine repair to supplement his income as a plumber—in Clarksburg, this had been—and the two sheds out back where he worked had been dotted with cast-off parts, bald tires, and any number of derelict mowers and rototillers. An eyesore, Elaine’s mother had complained. It pays for your Fridays at the beauty salon, replied the king of the castle, and so the mess had remained.
Elaine needed to put her whole weight against one of the doors before it would move on its dirty track, but eventually she got it to slide four or five feet, and that was all she needed.
“What’s the matter, sweetie?” she had asked her crying daughter—before she’d known that damned tree existed, when she’d thought her child’s tears were the only problem she had, and that they would end as quickly as a spring shower. “Does your tummy hurt from supper?”
“No,” Nana said, “and you don’t need to call it my tummy, Mom. I’m not five.”
That exasperated tone was new, and set Elaine back on her heels a bit, but she continued to stroke Nana’s hair. “What is it, then?”
Nana’s lips had tightened, trembled, and then she had burst. “I miss Daddy! I miss Billy, he held my hand sometimes when we walked to school and that was nice, he was nice, but mostly I miss Daddy! I want this vacation to be over! I want to go back home!”
Instead of stopping, as spring showers did, her weeping had become a storm. When Elaine tried to stroke her cheek, Nana knocked her hand away and sat up in bed with her hair wild and staticky around her face. In that moment, Elaine saw Frank in her. She saw him so clearly it was scary.
“Don’t you remember how he shouted at us?” Elaine asked. “And the time he punched the wall! That was awful, wasn’t it?”
“He shouted at you!” Nana shouted. “At you, because you always wanted him to do something . . . or get something . . . or be something different . . . I don’t know, but he never shouted at me!”
“He pulled your shirt, though,” Elaine said. Her disquiet deepened into something like horror. Had she thought Nana had forgotten Frank? Relegated him to the junkheap along with her invisible friend, Mrs. Humpty-Dump? “It was your favorite, too.”
“Because he was afraid of the man with the car! The one who ran over the cat! He was taking care of me!”
“Remember when he yelled at your teacher, remember how embarrassed you were?”
“I don’t care! I want him!”
“Nana, that’s enough. You’ve made your p—”
“I want my Daddy!”
“You need to close your eyes and go to sleep and have sweet dr—”
“I WANT MY DADDY!”
Elaine had left the room, closing the door gently behind her. What an effort it had been not to descend to the child’s level and slam it! Even now, standing in Mr. Patel’s oil-smelling shed, she would not admit how close she had come to shouting at her daughter. It wasn’t Nana’s strident tone, so unlike her usual soft and tentative voice; it wasn’t even the physical resemblance to Frank, which she could usually overlook. It was how much she sounded like him as she made her unreasonable and unfulfillable demands. It was almost as if Frank Geary had reached across from the other side of whatever gulf separated that violent old world from this new one, and possessed her child.
Nana had seemed her old self the next day, but Elaine had been unable to stop thinking about the tears heard through the door, and the way Nana knocked away the hand that had meant only to comfort, and that ugly, yelling voice that came from Nana’s child’s mouth: I want my Daddy. Nor was that all. She had been holding hands with ugly little Billy Beeson from down the block. She missed her little boyfriend, who probably would have enjoyed taking her behind a bush so they could play doctor. It was even easy to imagine Nana and the scabrous Billy at sixteen, making out in the back of his father’s Club Cab. French kissing her and auditioning her for the position of first cook and bottle washer in his shitty little castle. Forget about drawing pictures, Nana, get out in the kitchen and rattle those pots and pans. Fold my clothes. Haul my ashes, then I’ll burp and roll over and go to sleep.
Elaine had brought a crank flashlight, which she now shone on the interior of the auto annex, which had been left alone. With no fuel to run Dooling’s autos, there was no need for fan belts and spark plugs. So what she was looking for might be here. Plenty of that stuff had been stored in her father’s workshop, and the oily smell in this one was just the same, bringing back with startling vividness memories of the pigtailed girl she’d been (but not with nostalgia, oh no). Handing her father parts and tools as he called for them, stupidly happy when he thanked her, cringing if he scolded her for being slow or grabbing the wrong thing. Because she had wanted to please him. He was her daddy, big and strong, and she wanted to please him in all things.
This world was ever so much better than the old man-driven one. No one yelled at her here, and no one yelled at Nana. No one treated them like second-class citizens. This was a world where a little girl could walk home by herself, even after dark, and feel safe. A world where a little girl’s talent could grow along with her hips and breasts. No one would nip it in the bud. Nana didn’t understand that, and she wasn’t alone; if you didn’t think so, all you had to do was listen in at one of those stupid meetings.
I think it’s a way out, Lila had said as the women stood in the tall grass, looking at that weird tree. And oh God, if she was right.
Elaine walked deeper into the auto supply shed, training the flashlight beam on the floor, because the floor was concrete, and concrete kept things cool. And there, in the far corner, was what she had been hoping for: three five-gallon cans with their pour-tops screwed down tight. They were plain metal, unmarked, but there was a thick red rubber band girdling one of them and blue bands around the other two. Her father had marked his tins of kerosene in exactly the same way.
I think it’s a way out. A way back. If we want it.
Some of them undoubtedly would. The Meeting women who couldn’t understand what a good thing they had here. What a fine thing. What a safe thing. These were the ones so socialized to generations of servitude that they would eagerly rush back into their chains. The ones from the prison would, counterintuitively, probably be the first to want to go home to the old world, and right back into the pokey from which they’d been released. So many of these childish creatures were unable or unwilling to realize that there was nearly always some unindicted male co-conspirator behind their incarceration. Some man for whom they’d degraded themselves. In her years as a volunteer, Elaine had seen it, and heard it all a million times over. “He’s got a good heart.” “He doesn’t mean it.” “He promises he’ll change.” Hell, she was vulnerable to it herself. In the midst of that endless day and night, before they fell asleep and were transported, she’d almost let herself believe, in spite of everything she’d experienced with Frank in the past, that he would do what she asked, that he would get control of his temper. Of course, he hadn’t.
Elaine didn’t believe Frank could change. It was his male nature. But he had changed her. Sometimes she thought that Frank had driven her mad. To him, she was the scold, the taskmaster, the grating alarm bell that ended recess each day. It awed her, Frank’s obliviousness to the weight of her responsibilities. Did he actually believe it made her happy, having to remind him to pay bills, to pick up things, to keep his temper in check? She was certain that he actually did. Elaine was not blind: she saw that her husband was not a contented man. But he did not see her at all.
She had to act, for the sake of Nana and all the others. That was what had come into focus that very afternoon, even as Tiffany Jones was dying in that diner, giving up the last of her poor wrecked life so that a child might live.
There would be women who wanted to return. Not a majority, Elaine had to believe most of the women here were not so insane, so masochistic, but could she take that chance? Could she, when her own sweet Nana, who had shrunk into herself every time her father raised his voice—
Stop thinking about it, she told herself. Concentrate on your business.
The red band meant cheap kerosene, and would probably be of no more use to her than the gasoline stored under the town’s various service stations. You could douse a lit match in red-band kerosene once it was old. But those blue bands meant that a stabilizer had been added, and that kind might retain its volatility for ten years or more.
The Tree they’d found that day might be amazing, but it was still a tree, and trees burned. There was the tiger to reckon with, of course, but she would take a gun. Scare it away, shoot it if necessary. (She knew how to shoot; her father had taught her.) Part of her thought that might turn out to be a needless precaution. Lila had called the tiger and the fox emissaries, and to Elaine, that felt right. She had an idea that the tiger would not try to stop her, that the Tree was essentially unguarded.
If it was a door, it needed to be closed for good.
Someday Nana would understand, and thank her for doing the right thing.
9
Lila did sleep, but woke shortly after five, with the coming day just a sour line of light on the eastern horizon. She got up and used the chamber pot. (Running water had come to Dooling, but it had not yet reached the house on St. George. “A week or two, perhaps,” Magda assured them.) Lila considered going back to bed, but knew she would only toss and turn and think about how Tiffany—ashy gray at the end—had lost consciousness for the final time with her newborn baby still in her arms. Andrew Jones, whose only legacy would be a stapled-together booklet of handwritten pages.
She dressed, and left the house. She had no particular destination in mind, but wasn’t entirely surprised when she saw the shattered hulk of the Municipal Building ahead of her; she had spent most of her adult life working there. It was a kind of magnetic north, even though there was nothing there now, really, to see. A fire of some sort had done the damage—started by a lightning strike, maybe, or faulty wiring. The side of the building that had contained Lila’s office was blackened rubble, while years of weather had swept through the broken walls and windows and done its work on the other half, making the drywall soft for mold, blowing in debris that had gathered in layers across the floors.
So it surprised Lila to see someone sitting on the granite steps. The steps were about all the old building had going for it anymore.
As she drew closer, the figure stood and approached her.
“Lila?” Although full of uncertainty and thick with recently shed tears, the voice was familiar. “Lila, is it you?”
New women appeared only rarely now, and if this was to be the last, there could be no better. Lila ran to her, embraced her, kissed her on both cheeks. “Linny! Oh God, it’s so good to see you!”
Linny Mars hugged her back with panicky force, then held her away so she could look at Lila’s face. Making sure. Lila understood perfectly and remained still. But Linny was smiling, and the tears on her cheeks were good ones. It felt to Lila as if some divine scale had been balanced—Tiffany’s departure on one side, Linny’s arrival on the other.
“How long have you been sitting there?” Lila asked at last.
“I don’t know,” said Linny. “An hour, maybe two. I saw the moon go down. I . . . I didn’t know where else to go. I was in the office, looking at my laptop, and then . . . how did I get here? Where is here?”
“It’s complicated,” Lila replied, and as she led Linny back to the steps, it occurred to her that this was a thing women said often, men almost never. “In a sense, you’re still in the office, only in one of the cocoons. Or at least, that’s what we think.”
“Are we dead? Ghosts? Is that what you’re saying?”
“No. This is a real place.” Lila hadn’t been completely sure of this at first, but now she was. Familiarity might or might not breed contempt, but it certainly bred belief.
“How long have you been here?”
“At least eight months. Maybe more. Time moves faster on this side of—well, whatever it is that we’re on. I’d guess that over there—where you’ve come from—it’s not even been a full week since Aurora started, right?”
“Five days. I think.” Linny sat back down.
Lila felt like a woman who has been long abroad, and was eager for news of home. “Tell me what’s happening in Dooling.”
Linny squinted at Lila and then gestured at the street. “But this is Dooling, isn’t it? Only it looks kind of cracked up.”
“We’re working on that,” Lila said. “Tell me what was going on when you left. Have you heard from Clint? Do you know anything about Jared?” That was unlikely, but she had to ask.
“I can’t tell you much,” Linny said, “because the last two days all I could think about was staying awake. I kept taking those drugs in the evidence room, the ones from the Griner brothers bust, but by the end they were hardly working at all. And there was weird stuff. People coming and going. Yelling. Somebody new in charge. I think his name was Dave.”
“Dave who?” It was all Lila could do to keep from shaking her dispatcher.
Linny frowned down at her hands, concentrating, trying to remember.
“Not Dave,” she said at last. “Frank. A big guy. He was wearing a uniform, not a cop’s uniform, but then he changed it for a cop’s uniform. Frank Gearhart, maybe?”
“Do you mean Frank Geary? The animal control officer?”
“Yes,” Linny said. “Geary, that’s right. Boy, he’s intense. A man on a mission.”
Lila didn’t know what to make of the Geary news. She remembered interviewing him for the job that had gone to Dan Treat. Geary had been impressive in person—quick, confident—but his record as an animal control officer had troubled her. He’d been way too free with citations, and received too many complaints.
“What about Terry? He’s the senior officer, he should have taken my place.”
“Drunk,” Linny said. “A couple of the other deputies were laughing about it.”
“What do you—”
Linny raised her hand to stop her. “But then right before I fell asleep, some men came in and said Terry wanted the guns from the armament room because of a woman up at the prison. The one who talked to me was that public defender guy, the one you say reminds you of Will Gardner on The Good Wife.”
“Barry Holden?” Lila didn’t get it. The woman up at the prison was undoubtedly Evie Black, and Barry had helped Lila get Evie in a cell at Correctional, but why would he—
“Yes, him. And some others were with him. One was a woman. Warden Coates’s daughter, I think.”
“That can’t be,” Lila said. “She works in DC.”
“Well, maybe it was someone else. By then it was like I was in a deep fog. But I remember Don Peters, because of how he tried to feel me up on New Year’s Eve last year at the Squeaky Wheel.”
“Peters from the prison? He was with Barry?”
“No, Peters came after. He was furious when he found out some of the guns were gone. ‘They got all of the good ones,’ he said, I remember that, and there was a kid with him and that kid said . . . he said . . .” Linny looked at Lila with enormous eyes. “He said, ‘What if they’re taking them to Norcross, up at the prison? How will we get the bitch out then?’ ”
In her mind Lila pictured a tug-of-war rope, with Evie Black as the knot in the middle that would mean victory for one side or the other.
“What else do you remember? Think, Linny, this is important!” Although what could she, Lila, do about it, even if it was?
“Nothing,” Linny said. “After Peters and the young guy went running out, I fell asleep. And woke up here.” She looked around doubtfully, still not sure that there was a here. “Lila?”
“Mmm?”
“Is there anything to eat? I guess I really must not be dead, because I’m starving.”
“Sure,” Lila said, helping the other woman to her feet. “Scrambled eggs and toast, how does that sound?”
“Like heaven. I feel like I could eat half a dozen eggs and have room left over for pancakes.”
But as it turned out, Linnette Mars never got breakfast; she had, in fact, eaten her last meal the day before (two cherry Pop-Tarts microwaved in the sheriff’s station break room). As the two women turned onto St. George Street, Lila felt Linny’s hand melt away in her own. She caught just a glimpse of Linny from the corner of her eye, looking startled. Then there was nothing left but a cloud of moths, rising into the morning sky.