CHAPTER 14
1
When Jeanette opened her eyes, a fox was lying down outside the door to Evie’s cell. Its snout rested on the fissured cement floor, from which ridges of green moss sprouted.
“Tunnel,” Jeanette said to herself. Something about a tunnel. She said to the fox, “Did I go through one? I don’t remember, if I did. Are you from Evie?”
It didn’t answer, as she had almost expected it might. (In dreams animals could talk, and this felt like a dream . . . yet at the same time didn’t.) The fox only yawned, looked at her slyly, and pushed itself to its feet.
A Wing was empty, and a hole gaped in the wall. Beams of morning sunlight poured through. There was frost on the chunks of broken cement, beading and liquefying as the temperature rose.
Jeanette thought, I feel awake again. I believe I am awake.
The fox made a mewling noise and trotted to the hole. It glanced at Jeanette, mewled a second time, and went through, and was swallowed by the light.
2
She gingerly picked her way through the hole, stooping under the sharp edges of gashed cement, and found herself in a field of knee-high weeds and dead sunflowers. The morning light made Jeanette squint. Her feet crunched frozen undergrowth and the cool air raised gooseflesh under the thin fabric of her uniform.
The strong sensations of fresh air and sunshine awakened her completely. Her old body, exhausted by trauma and stress and lack of sleep, was a skin that had been shucked. Jeanette felt new.
The fox cut briskly through the grass, taking her past the east side of the prison toward Route 31. Jeanette had to walk fast to keep up as her eyes adjusted to the sharp daylight. She flashed a glance at the prison: naked brambles choked the walls; the rusted hump of a bulldozer and an RV were jammed against the front of the building, also thick with brambles; extravagant clumps of yellow grass sprouted from cracks and gashes in the parking lot; other rusted vehicles were stranded across the tarmac. Jeanette looked in the opposite direction. The fences were down—she could see flattened chainlink glinting among the weeds. Although Jeanette couldn’t make sense of the how or the why, she immediately absorbed the what. This was Dooling Correctional, but the world had spun on for years.
Her guide continued up from the ditch that edged Route 31, crossed the cracked and disintegrating road, and entered the blue-green dark of the rising woods on the other side. As the fox ascended, his orange brush bobbed and flashed in the dimness.
Jeanette ran across the road, keeping her eye on the flicking tail. One of her sneakers skated in a patch of damp, and she had to snatch for a branch to keep from losing her feet. The freshness of the air—tree sap and composting leaves and wet earth—burned down her throat and into her chest. She was out of prison, and a memory of playing Monopoly as a girl surfaced: Get Out of Jail Free! This wondrous new reality excised the square of forest from time itself, and made it an island beyond reach—of industrial cleaners, of orders, of jangling keys, of cellmate snores and farts, of cellmate crying, of cellmate sex, of cell doors banging shut—where she was the sole ruler; Queen Jeanette, evermore. It was sweet, sweeter even than she’d fantasized, to be free.
But then:
“Bobby.” She whispered it to herself. That was the name she had to remember, had to bring with her, so she would not be tempted to stay.
3
Judging distance was difficult for Jeanette; she was used to the level rubber track that circled the yard at the prison, each loop about half a mile. The steady southwest climb was more demanding than that and she had to lengthen her strides, making her thigh muscles sing in a way that hurt and felt wonderful at the same time. The fox stopped once in awhile to let her close some of the distance before he trotted on. She was sweating hard despite the chill. The air felt like that knife-edge of time when winter teetered on the edge of spring. A few green-tipped buds flashed in the gray-brown of the woods, and where the earth was naked to the sky, it was squishy with melt.
Maybe it was two miles, maybe three, when the fox led Jeanette around the rear side of a fallen trailer beached in a sea of weeds. Ancient yellow police tape fluttered on the ground. She had an idea she was getting close now. She heard a faint buzz in the air. The sun was higher and it was getting toward noon. She was starting to feel thirsty and hungry, and there might be something to eat and drink at her destination—how perfect a cold pop would be just now! But never mind, Bobby was what she needed to be thinking about. Seeing Bobby again. Ahead, the fox disappeared beneath an arch of broken trees.
Jeanette hurried after, passing a pile of rubble wigged in weeds. It might once have been a small cabin or shed. Here moths covered the branches of the trees, their countless tan bodies pressed together so that they resembled strange barnacles. Which followed somehow, Jeanette thought, understanding innately that the world she found herself in was outside of all she had ever known, like a land at the bottom of the sea. The moths appeared still, but she could hear them crackling softly, as if speaking.
Bobby, they seemed to say. It’s not too late to start again, they seemed to say.
The slope finally topped out. Through the last of the woods, Jeanette could see the fox standing in the faded grasses of a winter field. She sucked at the air. A kerosene scent, wholly unexpected and seemingly unattached to anything, tingled in her nose and mouth.
Jeanette stepped into the open and saw something that could not be. Something that made her sure she was no longer in the Appalachian country she had always known.
4
It was a white tiger, coat tipped with black, fin-shaped markings. It rolled its head and roared, sounding like the MGM lion. Behind it soared a tree—a Tree—bursting up from the earth in a tangle of a hundred trunks that twisted into a looming, sprawling fountain of branches, dripping with leaves and curling mosses, alive with the flitting bodies of tropical birds. A massive red snake, shining and glittering, coursed up the center.
The fox trotted up to a gaping split in the bole, tossed a somehow roguish look at Jeanette, and vanished into the depths. That was it, that was the tunnel that went both ways. The tunnel that would take her back to the world she had left, the one where Bobby waited. She started toward it.
“Stop where you are. And raise your hands.”
A woman in a checked yellow button-down and blue jeans stood in grass that came up to her knees, pointing a pistol at Jeanette. She had come around the side of the Tree, which was, at its base, roughly the size of an apartment building. In the hand that wasn’t holding the pistol she had a canister with a blue rubber band around its middle.
“No closer. You’re new, aren’t you? And your clothes say you’re from the prison. You must be confused.” A peculiar smile touched Ms. Yellow Shirt’s lips, a futile attempt to soften the oddness of the situation—the Tree, the tiger, the gun. “I want to help you. I will help you. We’re all friends here. I’m Elaine, okay? Elaine Nutting. Just let me do this one thing and we’ll talk more.”
“What thing?” Jeanette asked, although she was pretty sure she knew; why else the kerosene stink? The woman was getting ready to light the Impossible Tree on fire. If it burned, the way back to Bobby burned. Evie had pretty much said so. It couldn’t be allowed, but how was the woman to be stopped? She was at least six yards away, too far to rush her.
Elaine went down on one knee, watching Jeanette carefully as she laid the pistol aside in the dirt (but close at hand) and quickly unscrewed the cap of the kerosene canister. “I already spread the first two around. I just need to finish making a circle. To be sure it’ll go up.”
Jeanette took a couple of steps forward. Elaine snatched up the gun and got to her feet. “Stay back!”
“You can’t do this,” Jeanette said. “You have no right.”
The white tiger sat near the crevice that had absorbed the fox. It thumped its tail back and forth and watched with half-closed eyes of a brilliant amber.
Elaine splashed kerosene against the Tree, staining the wood a deeper brown. “I have to do this. It’s better this way. It solves all the problems. How many men have hurt you? Plenty, I imagine. I’ve worked with women like you for my entire adult life. I know you didn’t just walk into prison on your own. A man pushed you.”
“Lady,” Jeanette said, offended by the idea that one look at her could tell anyone anything that mattered. “You don’t know me.”
“Maybe not personally, but I’m right, aren’t I?” Elaine dumped the last of the kerosene onto some roots and pitched the canister aside. Jeanette thought, you ain’t Elaine Nutting, you’re Elaine Nuts.
“There was a man who hurt me, yes. But I hurt him worse.” Jeanette took a step toward Elaine. She was about fifteen feet away now. “I killed him.”
“Good for you, but don’t come any closer.” Elaine waved the pistol back and forth, as if she could brush Jeanette away. Or erase her.
Jeanette took another step. “Some people say he deserved it, even some who were his friends once. Okay, they can believe that. But the DA didn’t believe it. More important, I don’t believe it, although it’s true I wasn’t in my right mind when it happened. And it’s true that no one helped me when I needed help. So I killed him, and I wish I hadn’t. It’s on me, not him. I have to live with that. And I do.”
Another step, just a small one.
“I’m strong enough to take my share of the blame, okay? But I’ve got a son who needs me. He needs to know how to grow up right, and that’s something I can teach him. I’m done being pushed around by anyone, man or woman. The next time Don Peters tries to get me to give him a handjob, I won’t kill him, but I . . . I’ll scratch his eyes out, and if he hits me, I’ll keep right on scratching. I’m done being a punching bag. So you can take what you think you know about me, and you can shove it where the sun doesn’t shine.”
“I believe you may have lost your mind,” said Elaine.
“Aren’t there women here who want to go back?”
“I don’t know.” Elaine’s eyes shifted. “Probably. But they’re misguided.”
“And you get to make that decision for them?”
“If no one else has the guts,” Elaine said (with absolutely no awareness of how like her husband she sounded), “then yes. In that case, it’s down to me.” From the pocket of her jeans, she withdrew a long-barreled trigger lighter, the kind people used to fire up the coals in a barbecue. The white tiger was watching and purring—a deep rumbling sound like an idling engine. It didn’t look to Jeanette as if there would be any help from that direction.
“Guess you don’t have any kids, huh?” Jeanette asked.
The woman looked hurt. “I have a daughter. She’s the light of my life.”
“And she’s here?”
“Of course she is. She’s safe here. And I intend to keep her that way.”
“What does she say about that?”
“What she says doesn’t matter. She’s just a child.”
“Okay, what about all the women who had to leave boy children behind? Don’t they have a right to raise their kids and keep them safe? Even if they do like it here, don’t they have that responsibility?”
“See,” Elaine said, smirking, “that statement alone is enough to tell me you’re foolish. Boys grow up to be men. And it’s men who cause all the trouble. They’re the ones who shed the blood and poison the earth. We are better off here. There are male babies here, yes, but they’re going to be different. We’ll teach them to be different.” She took a deep breath. The smirk spread, as if she were inflating it with crazy-gas. “This world will be kind.”
“Let me ask you again: You mean to close the door on the life all them other ladies left behind without even asking them?”
Elaine’s smile faltered. “They might not understand, so I . . . I’m making . . .”
“What’re you making, lady? Besides a mess?” Jeanette slid her hand in her pocket.
The fox reappeared and sat beside the tiger. The red snake slithered weightily across one of Jeanette’s sneakers, but she did not so much as look down. These animals did not attack, she understood; they were from what some preacher, back in the dim days of her optimistic churchgoing childhood, had called the Peaceable Kingdom.
Elaine flicked the lighter’s switch. Flame wavered from the tip. “I am making an executive decision!”
Jeanette pulled her hand from her pocket and hurled a handful of peas at the other woman. Elaine flinched, raised her hand with the gun in an instinctive motion of defense, and stepped back. Jeanette closed the remaining distance and caught her around the waist. The gun tumbled from Elaine’s hand and fell into the dirt. She hung onto the lighter, though. Elaine stretched, the flame at the tip curling toward the knot of kerosene-dampened roots. Jeanette banged Elaine’s wrist against the ground. The lighter slipped from her hand and went out, but too late—guttering blue flames danced along one of the roots, moving up toward the trunk.
The red snake slithered up the Tree, wanting away from the fire. The tiger rose, lazily, went to the burning root, and planted a paw on it. Smoke rose around the paw, and Jeanette smelled singeing fur, but the tiger remained planted. When it stepped away, the blue flames were gone.
The woman was weeping as Jeanette rolled off her. “I just want Nana to be safe . . . I just want her to grow up safe . . .”
“I know.” Jeanette had never met this woman’s daughter and probably never would, but she recognized the sound of true pain, spirit pain. She had experienced plenty of that herself. She picked up the barbecue lighter. Examined it. Such a small tool to close the door between two worlds. It might have worked, if not for the tiger. Was it supposed to do that, Jeanette wondered, or had it gone beyond its purview? And if that was so, would it be punished?
So many questions. So few answers. Never mind. She whipped her arm in a circle, and watched the barbecue lighter go spinning away. Elaine gave a cry of despair as it disappeared into the grass forty or fifty feet distant. Jeanette bent and picked up the pistol, meaning to put it in her belt, but of course she was wearing her inmate browns and had no belt. Belts were a no-no. Inmates sometimes hung themselves with belts, if they had them. There was a pocket in her drawstring pants, but it was shallow and still half full of peas; the gun would fall right out. What to do with it? Throwing it away seemed to be the wisest course.
Before she could do that, leaves rustled behind her. Jeanette swung around with the pistol in her hand.
“Hey! Drop it! Drop the gun!”
At the edge of the woods stood another armed woman, her own pistol trained on Jeanette. Unlike Elaine, this one held her weapon in both hands and with her legs planted wide, as if she knew what she was doing. Jeanette, no stranger to orders, started to lower the gun, meaning to put it in the grass beside the Tree . . . but a prudent distance away from Elaine Nutball, who might make a grab for it. As she bent, the snake rustled along the branch above her. Jeanette flinched and raised the hand holding the gun to protect her head from a half-glimpsed falling object. There was a crack, then a faint tink, two coffee mugs clicking together in a cabinet, and she seemed to hear Evie in her head—an inarticulate cry of mingled pain and surprise. After that, Jeanette was on the ground, the sky was nothing but leaves, and there was blood in her mouth.
The woman with the gun came forward. The muzzle was smoking, and Jeanette understood she had been shot.
“Put it down!” the woman ordered. Jeanette opened her hand, not knowing she still held the pistol until it rolled free.
“I know you,” Jeanette whispered. It felt as if there was a large warm weight on her chest. It was hard to breathe, but it didn’t hurt. “You were the one who brought Evie to the prison. The cop. I seen you through the window.”
“That smells like kerosene,” Lila said. She picked up the overturned canister, sniffed at it, then dropped it.
Outside that morning’s Meeting at the Shopwell, someone had mentioned that one of the golf carts was missing, and no one had signed the register for it; a girl named Maisie Wettermore had volunteered that she had seen Elaine Nutting just a few minutes earlier, driving one in the direction of Adams Lumberyard. Lila, who had come with Janice Coates, had exchanged a glance with the ex-warden. There were only two things in the direction of Adams Lumberyard these days: the desiccated ruins of a meth lab, and the Tree. It had worried both of them, the idea of Elaine Nutting going out there alone. Lila had remembered Elaine’s doubts about the animals there—the tiger, especially—and it occurred to her that she might try to kill it. This, Lila was certain, would be unwise. So, the two of them had taken out a golf cart of their own, and followed.
And now Lila had shot a woman she had never seen before, who lay bleeding on the ground, badly wounded.
“What the hell were you going to do?” she asked.
“Not me,” Jeanette said, and looked over at the weeping woman. “Her. She was the one. Her kerosene. Her gun. I stopped her.”
Jeanette knew she was dying. Coldness like well water rising up through her, taking away her toes, then the rest of her feet, then her knees, slipping up toward the heart of her. Bobby had been afraid of water when he was little.
And Bobby had been afraid someone was going to take his Coke and his Mickey Mouse hat. That was the moment captured in the photo on her little block of paint in the cell. No, honey, no, she had told him. Don’t you worry. Those are yours. Your mother’s not going to let anyone take them from you.
And if Bobby were here now, asking about this water? This water that his mother was sinking down into? Oh, she’d tell him, that’s nothing to worry about, either. It’s just a shock at first, but you get used to it.
But Jeanette was no Lying for Prizes champion. She wasn’t that caliber of contestant. She might have been able to get a fib past Bobby, but not Ree. If Ree had been there, she’d have had to admit, though the well water didn’t hurt, it didn’t feel right, either.
She could hear the host’s disembodied voice: That’s all for Jeanette Sorley, I’m afraid, but we’re sending her home with some lovely parting gifts. Tell her about them, Ken! The host sounded like Warner Wolf, Mr. Let’s-Go-to-the-Videotape himself. Hey, if you had to be sent home, you couldn’t ask for a better announcer.
Warden Coates, her hair now as white as chalk, interrupted Jeanette’s sky. It kind of suited her, the hair. She was too thin, though, big dents under her eyes, hollows at her cheeks.
“Sorley?” Coates went to a knee and took her hand. “Jeanette?”
“Oh, shit,” the cop said. “I think I just made a very bad mistake.” She dropped to her knees and put her palms against Jeanette’s wound, applying pressure, knowing it was pointless. “I only meant to wing her, but the distance . . . and I was so afraid for the Tree . . . I’m sorry.”
Jeanette felt blood leaking from both corners of her mouth. She began to gasp. “I have a son—his name is Bobby—I have a son—”
Jeanette’s last words were directed at Elaine, and the last thing she saw was that woman’s face, her wide, scared eyes. “—Please—I have a son—”