CHAPTER 17
1
In the Shopwell supermarket, where the Meetings were traditionally held, Evie spoke to a large gathering of those who now called Our Place home. It didn’t take long for her to speak her piece, which boiled down to one thing: it was their choice.
“If you stay here, every woman, from Dooling to Marrakesh, will appear in this world, in the place where they fell asleep. Free to begin again. Free to raise their children the way they want to. Free to make peace. It’s a good deal, or so it seems to me. But you can go. And if you do, every woman will awaken where they fell asleep in the world of men. But you all must go.”
“What are you?” Janice Coates, holding Michaela tight, spoke to Evie over her daughter’s shoulder. “Who gave you this power?”
Evie smiled. A green light hovered around her. “I’m just an old woman who looks young for the time being. And I don’t have any power. Like the fox, I’m only an emissary. It’s you, all of you, who have the power.”
“Well,” Blanche McIntyre said, “let’s talk it out. Like a jury. Because I guess that’s what we are.”
“Yes,” Lila said. “But not here.”
2
It took until the afternoon to gather the inhabitants of the new world. Messengers were sent to every corner of the town to call forth the women who hadn’t been at the supermarket.
They walked from Main Street in a quiet column and climbed up Ball’s Hill. Blanche McIntyre’s feet were bothering her, so Mary Pak drove her in one of the golf carts. Blanche held Andy Jones, the infant orphan, bundled in a blue blanket and told him a very short story: “Once upon a time, there was a little guy, who went here and there, and every lady in the place loved him.”
Tufts of green were sprouting. It was cold, but spring was on the verge. They had almost caught up to the time of year it had been in the old world when they had left. The realization surprised Blanche. It felt to her as though a far longer period had elapsed.
When they left the road and started up the moth-lined path through the woods, the fox appeared to conduct them the rest of the way.
3
Once Evie’s terms had been re-explained for those who needed to be caught up, Michaela Coates stood on a milk crate, donned her reporter’s hat (perhaps for the last time, perhaps not), and told them all what had happened on the outside.
“Dr. Norcross convinced the vigilantes to stand down,” she said. “A number of men gave their lives before reason prevailed.”
“Who died?” one woman shouted out. “Please say my Micah wasn’t one of them!”
“What about Lawrence Hicks?” asked another.
There was a babble of questioning voices.
Lila raised her hands. “Ladies, ladies!”
“I ain’t no lady,” grumbled an ex-inmate named Freida Elkins. “Speak for yourself, Sheriff.”
“I can’t tell you who’s dead,” Michaela resumed, “because during most of the fighting I was stuck in the prison. I know that Garth Flickinger is dead, and . . .” She was about to mention Barry Holden, then saw his wife and remaining daughters looking at her expectantly, and lost her nerve. “. . . and that’s about all I know. But I can tell you that all the boy children and infants in Dooling are fine and well.” Praying with all her heart that this was so.
The audience erupted in cheers, whoops, and applause.
When Michaela was finished, Janice Coates took her place, and explained that everyone would be given a turn to make her choice known.
“For myself,” she said, “I vote, with some regret, to return. This is a much better place than the one we left, and I believe the sky is the limit. Without men, we make decisions fairly, and with less fuss. We share resources with less argument. There has been very little in the way of violence among the members of our community. Women have irritated me my entire life, but they have nothing on men.” Her personal irony, that her own husband, poor Archie, bounced from life by that early heart attack, was such an equable, sensible man, she did not mention. Exceptions were not the point. The point was the general case. The point was history.
Where Janice’s features had once been lean, now they were burned down to the bone. Her white hair flowed down her back. Plunged in their sockets, her eyes had a distant shine. It struck Michaela that her mother, no matter how straight she stood or how clearly she spoke, had become ill. You need a doctor, Mom.
“However,” Janice went on, “I also believe I owe it to Dr. Norcross to go back. He risked his life, and the others risked theirs, for the women of the prison when I doubt many others would have. Related to that, I want to make it known to you women who were inmates at the prison that I will do whatever I can to see your sentences commuted, or at the very least lessened. And if you want to double-time it for the hills, I will inform the authorities in Charleston and Wheeling that I believe you were killed in the attack.”
Those former prisoners came forward in a bloc. There were fewer than there had been that morning. Kitty McDavid, among others, had vanished without a trace (except for a brief flurry of moths). No doubt remained about what that might mean—those women were dead in both worlds. Men had killed them.
And yet every single inmate voted to go back. This might have surprised a man, but it didn’t surprise Warden Janice Coates, who knew a telling statistical fact: when women escaped prison, most were recaptured almost immediately, because they did not usually double-time it for the hills, as men were wont to do. What women did was go home. First on the minds of the former inmates who spoke at that final meeting were the male children in that other world.
For example, Celia Frode: Celia said Nell’s boys would need mothering, and even if Celia had to go back to lockup, Nell’s sister could be counted on to stand for them. “But Nell’s sister won’t be much use to them if she’s asleep, will she?”
Claudia Stephenson spoke to the ground so softly that the crowd called for her to repeat herself. “I don’t want to hold anybody down,” she repeated. “I’ll go along with the majority.”
The First Thursdays also voted to return. “It’s better here,” Gail said, speaking for all of them, “Janice is right about that. But it’s not really Our Place. It’s someplace else. And who knows, maybe all that’s apparently happened over there will make that place better.”
Michaela thought she was probably right, but likely just in the short term. Men promised never to raise another hand to their wives or children often enough, and meant it at the time, but were only able to keep their promises for a month or two, if that. The rage came around again, like a recurring bout of malaria. Why would this be different?
Large, cool gusts rippled through the high grass. V-shaped flocks of geese, returning from the uninhabited south, crossed the blue pane above the crowd.
It feels like a funeral, Mary Pak thought. It was so undeniable—like death was—bright enough to scald your eyes, cool enough to go through your coat and your sweater and raise goosebumps along your skin.
When it was her turn, she said, “I want to find out what it feels like to really fall in love with a boy.” This confession surely would have sundered Jared Norcross’s heart, had he been present to hear it. “I know the world’s easier for men, and it’s lousy, and it’s stacked, but I want a chance at a regular life like I always expected to have, and maybe that’s selfish, but that’s what I want, okay? I might even want to have a baby. And . . . that’s all I got.” These last words broke apart into sobs and Mary stepped down, waving away the women who tried to comfort her.
Magda Dubcek said that of course she had to go back. “Anton needs me.” Her smile was terrible in its innocence. Evie saw that smile, and her heart broke.
(From a spot a few yards distant, scraping his back against a pin oak, the fox eyed the blue bundle that was Andy Jones, nestled in the rear of the golf cart. The baby was fast asleep, unguarded. There it was, the dream of dreams. Forget the hen, forget the whole fucking henhouse, forget all the henhouses that had ever been. The sweetest of all morsels, a human baby. Did he dare? Alas, he did not. He could only fantasize—but, oh, what a fantasy! Pink and aromatic flesh like butter!)
One woman spoke of her husband. He was a great guy, he really, really was, did his share, pulled for her, all that. Another woman talked about her songwriting partner. He was nobody’s idea of a picnic, but there was a connection they had, a way they were in tune. He was words; she was music.
Some just missed home.
Carol Leighton, the civics teacher at the high school, said she wanted to eat a Kit Kat that wasn’t stale and sit on her couch and watch a movie on Netflix and pet her cat. “My experiences with men have been one hundred percent lousy, but I am not cut out for starting over in a new world. Maybe I’m a coward for that, but I can’t pretend.” She was not alone in her wish for ordinary creature comforts left behind.
Mostly it was the sons, though, that drew them back. A new start for every woman in the world was goodbye forever to their precious sons and they couldn’t bear that. This also made Evie’s heart break, too. Sons killed sons. Sons killed daughters. Sons left guns out where other sons could find them and accidentally shoot themselves or their sisters. Sons burned forests and sons dumped chemicals into the earth as soon as the EPA inspectors left. Sons didn’t call on birthdays. Sons didn’t like to share. Sons hit children, choked girlfriends. Sons figured out they were bigger and never forgot it. Sons didn’t care about the world they left for their sons or for their daughters, although they said they did when the time came to run for office.
The snake glided down the Tree and drooped into the blackness, lolling before Evie. “I saw what you did,” she said to it. “I saw how you distracted Jeanette. And I hate you for it.”
The snake said nothing in return. Snakes do not need to justify their behavior.
Elaine Nutting stood beside her daughter, but she wasn’t present, not really. In her mind, she was still seeing the dead woman’s wet eyes. They were almost gold, those eyes, and very deep. The look in them wasn’t angry, just insistent. Elaine couldn’t deny those eyes. A son, the woman had said, I have a son.
“Elaine?” someone asked. It was time for her to make a decision.
“I have things I need to do,” Elaine said. She put her arm around Nana. “And my daughter loves her father.”
Nana hugged her back.
“Lila?” asked Janice. “What about you?”
They all turned to her, and Lila understood she could talk them out of it, if she wanted to. She could ensure the safety of this new world and destroy the old one. It would only take a few words. She could say, I love you all, and I love what we made here. Let’s not lose it. She could say, I’m going to lose my husband, no matter how heroic he may have tried to be, and I don’t want to lose this. She could say, You women will never be what you were, and what they expect, because part of you will always be here, where you were truly free. You’ll carry Our Place with you from now on, and because of that, you will always mystify them.
Except, really, when had men not been mystified by women? They were the magic that men dreamed of, and sometimes their dreams were nightmares.
The mighty blue sky had faded. The last streaks of light were magnesium smears above the hills. Evie was watching Lila, knowing it all came down to her.
“Yeah,” she told them. “Yeah. Let’s go back and get those guys in shape.”
They cheered.
Evie cried.
4
By twos, they departed, as if from the ark beached on Ararat. Blanche and baby Andy, Claudia and Celia, Elaine and Nana, Mrs. Ransom and Platinum Elway. They went hand-in-hand, carefully stepping over the giant riser of a gnarled root, and then into the deep night inside the Tree. In the space between, there was a glimmer, but it was diffuse, as if the light source came from around a corner—but the corner of what? It deepened the shadows without revealing much of anything. What each traveler did recall was noise and a feeling of warmth. Inside that faintly lit passage there was a crackling reverberation, a tickling sensation over the skin, like moths’ wings brushing—and then they awakened on the other side of the Tree, in the world of men, their cocoons melting away . . . but there were no moths. Not this time.
Magda Dubcek sat up in the hospital room where the police had conveyed her body after they discovered her asleep in the room with the body of her dead son. She wiped the webbing from her eyes, astonished to see a whole ward of women, rising up from their hospital beds, tearing at the shreds of their cocoons in an orgy of resurrection.
5
Lila watched the Tree shed its glossy leaves, as if it were weeping. They sifted to the ground and formed shiny mounds. Strings of moss slid down, whooshing from the branches. She watched a parrot, its marvelous green wings banded with silver marks, arise from the Tree and pierce the sky—watched it flap right into the dark and cease to be. Whorls of speckles, not unlike the Dutch Elm that Anton had warned her about, rapidly spread along the Tree’s roots. There was a sick smell in the air, like rot. She knew that the Tree had become infested, that something was devouring it from the inside while it died on the outside.
“See you back there, Ms. Norcross,” said Mary Pak, waving one hand, holding Molly’s hand with the other.
“You can call me Lila,” said Lila, but Mary had already gone through.
The fox trotted after them.
In the end, it was Janice, Michaela, Lila, and Jeanette’s body. Janice brought a shovel from one of the golf carts. The grave they made was only three feet deep, but Lila didn’t think it mattered. This world wouldn’t exist after they left it; there would be no animals to get at the body. They’d wrapped Jeanette in some coats, and covered her face with an extra baby blanket.
“It was an accident,” Janice said.
Lila bent down, scooped a handful of dirt, and tossed it on the shrouded figure in the hole. “The cops always say that after they shoot some poor black man or woman or child.”
“She had a gun.”
“She didn’t mean to use it. She came to save the Tree.”
“I know,” said Janice. She patted Lila’s shoulder. “But you didn’t. Remember that.”
A thick branch of the Tree moaned and cracked, smashing to the ground with an explosion of leaves.
“I’d give anything to take it back,” Lila said. She wasn’t crying. For now, tears were beyond her. “I’d give my soul.”
“I think it’s time to go,” said Michaela. “While we still can.” She took her mother’s hand and drew her into the Tree.
6
For a handful of minutes, Lila was the last woman in Our Place. She did not ponder this wonder, however. She had decided to be practical, starting right now. Her focus was on the dirt, on the shovel, and on filling the grave. Only when the work was done did she enter the dark of the Tree and cross over. She went without looking back. Doing that, she felt, would break her fragile heart.