1
To most people in the weeks after the women awoke, the world seemed a bit like some dismal thrift store boardgame: there were pieces missing, not necessarily the important pieces, but definitely some you’d like to have had. You sensed, at the very least, certain cards that might have helped you to victory were absent.
Grief was everywhere, like a disfigurement. But what did you do when you lost a wife, or a daughter, or your husband? Unless you were like Terry Coombs—and some were—you lived with the loss and went on playing the game.
Pudge Marone, bartender and owner of the Squeak, had lost a piece of himself and learned to live with it. His right thumb now ended below the knuckle. It took him awhile to lose the habit of reaching for beer taps with that hand, but he made do. Then, he received an offer for the building from a guy who wanted to open a TGI Fridays franchise. Pudge told himself the Squeaky Wheel would never have recovered from Aurora anyway, and the payday was not bad.
Certain people—Don Peters, for instance—were not missed much at all. They were so completely forgotten it was like they never existed. The wreck of the Peters property was sold at auction.
Johnny Lee Kronsky’s few possessions were bagged up with the trash, but his grim apartment remains unoccupied to this day.
Van had left the door open when she left Fritz Meshaum’s house that last day of Aurora, and after he had been dead a day or two, the turkey vultures came in and helped themselves to the free buffet. Smaller birds came inside to harvest Fritz’s wiry red beard for nesting materials. Eventually, an enterprising bear dragged the carcass outside. In time, insects polished his skeleton clean, and the sun bleached his overalls white. Nature made use of him and, as was her way, managed to make something beautiful: a bone sculpture.
When Magda Dubcek learned what had happened to Anton—the blood on her bedroom carpet told most of the story—she bitterly regretted her vote to come back. “What a mistake I have made,” she said to herself too many times to count, over too many rum and cokes to count. To Magda, her Anton wasn’t a piece, or two pieces, or three pieces; to her, he was the whole game. Blanche McIntyre tried to get Magda involved in volunteering—there were so many children who had lost a parent and needed help—and she invited her to join the book club, but Magda wasn’t interested. “There is no happy ending for me here,” she said. On long, sleepless nights, she drank and watched Boardwalk Empire. When she finished that one, she moved on to The Sopranos. She filled the empty hours with stories of mean men doing mean things.
2
For Blanche, there was a happy ending.
She awoke in Dorothy’s apartment, on the floor where she had fallen asleep a few days before, and peeled herself out of the remains of her decaying cocoon. Her friends were there, too, likewise coming around and tearing themselves free. But one thing was different: Andy Jones. The baby was not in Blanche’s arms, as he had been when she entered the Tree. He was asleep in a crude crib made of woven twigs on the floor nearby.
“Holy shit,” Dorothy said. “The kid! Yippee!”
Blanche took it as a sign. Tiffany Jones Daycare was built on the site of a home that had burned down during Aurora. The project was financed from Blanche’s retirement fund, and from that of her new boyfriend (which, in Willy Burke’s case, had been accruing without interest in the lining of his yellowed mattress since 1973), and from many community donations. In the wake of Aurora, it seemed that many more people were charitably inclined than had previously been the case. The Norcross family was particularly generous, in spite of their difficulties. On the sign outside, below Tiffany’s name, was a picture of a crib made of woven twigs.
Blanche and her staff accepted any child between the ages of one month and four years, regardless of the parents’ (or parent’s) ability to pay. After Aurora, it was small community operations like Blanche’s, in large part funded and staffed by men, that began the movement that led to the establishment of a universal childcare program. Many men seemed to understand that a rebalancing was necessary.
They had, after all, been warned.
Blanche thought once or twice of the novel they had met to talk about on that last night before everything changed: the story of a girl who told a lie that changed many lives. Blanche often considered the penance that weighed so heavily on that girl’s life. She, Blanche, did not feel that she owed any such penance. She was a decent person, had been a decent person all along, a hard worker and a good friend. She had always been good to the inmates of the prison. The daycare was not about atonement. It was about decency. It was natural, obvious, and essential. If the boardgame was missing pieces, it was sometimes—often, even—possible to make new ones.
Blanche had met Willy when he showed up at the door of the daycare, then still undergoing renovations, with a wad of fifty-dollar bills.
“What’s this now?” she asked.
“My share,” he said.
Except it wasn’t. Mere money wasn’t enough. If he wanted to share, he’d have to do his share.
“Kids crap so much,” Willy observed to Blanche one evening after they had been courting for awhile.
She was standing by her Prius, waiting for him to finish dragging two straining, translucent bags of used diapers to the bed of his truck. They would be washed at Tiny Tot Laundry in Maylock. Blanche had no intention of filling a landfill with used Pampers. Willy had lost weight and bought new suspenders. Blanche had thought he was cute before, but now, with his beard trimmed (and those pesky eyebrows), he was downright handsome.
“If you die on me, Willy,” said Blanche, “we’re going to have fun with the obituary. ‘Willy Burke died doing what he loved. Transporting poopy diapers across a parking lot.’ ” She blew him a kiss.
3
Jared Norcross volunteered at Tiffany Jones Daycare the following summer, and part-time during his senior year. He liked helping out. The kids were sort of demented—they made dirt castles and licked walls and rolled in puddles, and that was just when they were happy—but he was endlessly fascinated, like so many before him, at the easy way the boys and the girls played together. So what changed later on? Why did they suddenly split into largely separate playgroups almost as soon as they began organized school? Was it chemical? Genetic? Jared didn’t accept that. People were more complex; people had root systems, and their root systems had root systems. He had an inkling that in college he might like to study child behavior and eventually become a psychiatrist, like his father.
These thoughts comforted Jared and distracted him when he needed distracting, which was, during that period of his life, almost all the time. His parents’ marriage was breaking up, and Mary was dating Molly Ransom’s older cousin, a lacrosse star at a high school in the next county. He had seen them together once, Mary and her guy. They had been sitting at a picnic table outside an ice cream parlor, feeding each other ice cream cones. It could only have been more horrible if they were having sex.
Molly bird-dogged him once, heading out of his house. “What’s going on, dude? Mary and Jeff are coming over. You want to hang with us?” The little girl had braces now, and it seemed like she’d grown about seven feet. Soon the boys who didn’t want to play with her after school would be chasing her for maybe a kiss.
“I wish I could,” Jared said.
“So why can’t you?” Molly asked.
“Broken heart,” Jared said, and winked. “I know you’ll never love me, Molly.”
“Oh, please, get a life,” she said, and rolled her eyes.
Sometimes Jared’s steps carried him past the empty house where he’d hidden Mary and Molly and Mom. He and Mary had been a sweet team, he thought—but she had put all that firmly into the past. “It’s just a whole different world now, you know,” Mary had told him, as if that was any consolation, or explained anything at all. Jared told himself that she had no idea what she was missing, but decided—gloomily—that she probably wasn’t missing anything.
4
Cocoons, it turned out, could float.
Three women, passengers on the flight that had crashed in the Atlantic Ocean, awoke in their webs on a rocky beach in Nova Scotia. Their cocoons were wet, but the women inside them were dry. They walked to an empty rescue station and called directory assistance for help.
This item was relegated to the back pages of newspapers and webzines, if reported at all. In the shadow of that year’s major miracle, such minor ones were of little interest.
5
To find one’s husband dead inside an exhaust-filled garage was a terrible way to return home.
Rita Coombs had some bad moments after that: despair, terror of a single life, and of course her own sleepless nights when it seemed the next day would never come. Terry had been steady, smart, and genial. That he had bogged down in a depression so hideous and encompassing that he had taken his own life was hard to square with her experience of the man who had been her partner and the father of her child. She wept until she was sure all the tears were gone . . . and then more tears came.
A fellow named Geary visited her one afternoon to offer his condolences. Rita knew—though there were conflicting stories, and a desire to protect everyone involved had thrown a hush over the details of the event—that it was Geary who had directed the attack on the prison, but his manner was soft-spoken and kind. He insisted she call him Frank.
“What happened to my husband, Frank?”
Frank Geary said that he believed Terry just couldn’t bear it. “Everything was out of hand and he knew it. But he couldn’t stop it. The only thing he could stop was himself.”
She gathered herself and asked one of the questions that plagued her on her sleepless nights. “Mr. Geary . . . my husband . . . he had a little bit of a drinking problem. Did he . . . was he . . .”
“Sober the whole time,” Frank said. He raised his ringless left hand. “My word on it. Hand to God.”
6
Aurora’s mass outbreaks of violence and property damage, plus the disappearance of so many women, resulted in massive restructuring of the insurance industry nationwide and worldwide. Drew T. Barry, and the team at Drew T. Barry Indemnity, rode it out as well as any company in America, and managed to facilitate life insurance settlements for both Nate McGee’s widow and Eric Blass’s parents. Since both had died in the midst of an unauthorized assault on a penal institution, this had been no small feat, but Drew T. Barry was no mean insurance agent.
It was less difficult to achieve remuneration for the relatives, near and distant, of the Honorable Oscar Silver, Barry and Gerda Holden, Linny Mars, Officer Vern Rangle, Dr. Garth Flickinger, Officer Rand Quigley, Officer Tig Murphy, and Officer Billy Wettermore, all of whom, it could be legitimately claimed, had died under circumstances covered by their respective policies. Not that the various resolutions weren’t a long and involved process. It was the work of years, work that would see Drew T. Barry’s hair turn salty and his skin turn gray, and in the midst of it, during early mornings of emails and late nights of filings, Drew T. Barry lost his taste for hunting. It seemed decadent in juxtaposition to the seriousness of his work on behalf of the abandoned and the aggrieved. He’d sit in a stand, and see, on the other end of his scope, a deer with a ten-point rack wander through the mist, and think to himself, Act of God Insurance. Does that buck have Act of God Insurance? Because to a deer, that’s what getting shot must be, right? Will his children be taken care of? Can a dead buck with good insurance make a little dough? Of course not, the idea was even more ridiculous than the pun. So he sold his Weatherby, and even tried to become a vegetarian, although that didn’t work out so well. Sometimes, after a day in the existential toils of the insurance biz, a man needed a pork chop.
Loss changes you. Sometimes that’s bad. Sometimes it’s good. Either way, you eat your goddam pork chop and go on.
7
Due to the absence of identification, Lowell and Maynard Griner were buried in unmarked graves. Much later, when the Aurora craziness began to subside (not that it ever did, entirely), their fingerprints were matched with the extensive sheets on file and the brothers were officially declared dead. It was doubted by many, however, especially by folk who lived out in the brakes and hollers. Rumors abounded that Little Low and Maynard had made themselves a home in the shaft of an abandoned wildcat mine, that they were running Acapulco Gold further south under assumed names, that they drove the hills in a jacked-up midnight black Ford F-150 with a severed boar’s head chained to the grill and Hank Williams Jr. blasting from the stereo. An award-winning author, a man who had lived in Appalachia as a young man and fled as soon as he turned eighteen, heard some of the legends from his relatives, and used them as the basis of a children’s picture book titled The Bad Stupid Brothers. In the picture book, they end up as miserable toads in Poopy Swamp.
8
The stream that the Bright Ones cult had dammed near their compound in Hatch, New Mexico, broke, and the waters ripped the community’s buildings from their foundations. When the waters receded, the desert moved in; sand covered up the few discarded weapons that had been overlooked by the feds; a few pages of their new nation’s Constitution, which declared their dominion over the lands and waters they had seized and their rights to bear arms, and the United States federal government’s lack of standing to demand they pay their share of taxes, were speared on cactus needles. A graduate student studying botany, hiking to collect specimens of native desert plants, discovered several of these spiked pages.
“Thank you, God!” she cried and snatched them off the cactus. The graduate student’s stomach was bothering her. She hustled off the mountain path, defecated, and used the providential papers to wipe herself.
9
To continue the march to her thirty-year pension, Van Lampley took a job at the women’s prison in Curly, which was where the vast majority of Dooling’s surviving prisoners were shifted. Celia Frode ended up there, though not for long (paroled), and so did Claudia Stephenson.
They were, by and large, a rough bunch at Curly Correctional—lots of tightly wired girls, lots of tough women with felony priors—but Van was up to it. One day a white girl with faux gold teeth, cornrows, and a forehead tattoo (it said EMPTY in bleeding letters) asked Van how she got the limp. The inmate’s sneer was both piggy and jovial.
“I kicked a little too much ass,” Van said, a harmless lie. She had kicked exactly the right amount of ass. The officer rolled up her sleeve to show the tattoo on her mighty left bicep: YOUR PRIDE, etched on the gravestone with the wee arm. She turned the other way and rolled up the other sleeve. On her equally impressive right bicep another gravestone had been inked. ALL YOUR FUCKING PRIDE was etched on this one.
“Okay,” the tough girl said, losing the sneer. “You’re cool.”
“You better believe it,” Van said. “Now move along.”
Sometimes Van prayed with Claudia, now the ordained Reverend Stephenson. They prayed for forgiveness for their sins. They prayed for Ree’s soul. They prayed for Jeanette’s soul. They prayed for the babies and the mothers. They prayed for whatever needed praying on.
“What was she, Claudia?” Van asked once.
“It’s not what she was, Vanessa,” said Reverend Stephenson. “It’s what we are.”
“And what would that be?”
The reverend was stern—very unlike the old Claudia, who would not say boo to a goose. “Resolved to be better. Resolved to be stronger. Ready to do whatever we have to do.”
10
It would have killed her, the cervical cancer that had been brewing in Janice Coates, but the clock on the other side of the Tree had slowed its growth somehow. Also, her daughter had seen it on the other side of the Tree. Michaela took her mother to an oncologist two days after the women awoke, and the warden was receiving chemotherapy two days after that. Janice acquiesced to Michaela’s demand that she step down from her position immediately, allowing Michaela to make all the arrangements, to take care of her, to order her to the doctor, to bed, and to take her meds on a regular basis. Michaela also made sure her mother stopped smoking.
In Michaela’s humble opinion, cancer was horseshit. She had lost her father at a young age, and she was still working through some of the emotional horseshit that had come with that. But horseshit abounded. Horseshit was something you had to shovel pretty much non-stop if you were a woman, and if you were a woman in television, you had to shovel it double-time. Michaela could shovel it triple-time. She had not driven home from DC, rammed a bad biker’s vintage ride, stayed awake for days smoking Garth Flickinger’s meth, and survived a gruesome armed conflict in order to succumb to any variety of horseshit whatsoever, even if that horseshit was a disease that actually belonged to her mother.
Following her course of chemo, when the clean scan came back that told them Janice was in remission, Michaela said to her mother, “All right. What are you going to do now? You need to stay active.”
Janice said Mickey was absolutely right. Her first plan: to drive Michaela to DC. Her daughter needed to go back to work.
“Are you ever going to try and report on what happened?” Janice asked her daughter. “Personal experience type of thing?”
“I’ve thought about it, but . . .”
“But?”
There were problems, that was the but. First, most people would say that the adventures of the women on the far side of the Tree were horseshit. Second, they would say that no such supernatural creature as “Evie Black” had ever existed, and that Aurora had been caused by perfectly natural (if as yet undiscovered) means. Third, if certain authorities decided Michaela wasn’t spouting horseshit, questions would be raised that the authorities in Dooling—especially former Sheriff Lila Norcross—could not answer.
For a couple of days Janice stayed with her daughter in the capital. The cherry blossoms were long gone. It was hot, but they did a lot of walking anyway. On Pennsylvania Avenue they saw the president’s motorcade, a train of gleaming black limos and SUVs. It went straight through without stopping.
“Look.” Michaela pointed.
“Who gives a shit?” Janice said. “Just another swinging dick.”
11
In Akron, Ohio, at the apartment he lived in with his aunt Nancy, checks began to arrive made out to Robert Sorley. The amounts were never large—twenty-two dollars here, sixteen dollars there—but they added up. These checks were drawn from the account of a woman named Elaine Nutting. In the cards and letters that accompanied the checks, Elaine wrote to Bobby about his late mother, Jeanette, about the life of kindness and generosity and achievement that she had envisioned for him.
Though Bobby had not known her as well as he had wanted, and because of her crime, had never quite been able to trust her while she was alive, Bobby had loved his mother. The impression she seemed to have made on Elaine Nutting convinced him that she had been good.
Elaine’s daughter, Nana, included drawings with some of her mother’s letters. She was really talented. Bobby asked her to please draw him a picture of a mountain so he could look at it and think of the world beyond Akron, which wasn’t such a bad place but was, you know, Akron.
She did. It was a beauty—streams, a monastery in a crook of a valley, birds circling, clouds lit from above, a winding footpath leading to the unseen far side.
Because you said please, Nana wrote.
Of course I said please, he wrote back to her. Who doesn’t say please?
In her next letter, she wrote, I know a lot of boys who don’t say please. I don’t have room on this paper to write the names of all the boys I know who don’t say please.
In response, he wrote, I’m not one of those boys.
They became regular correspondents, and eventually planned to meet.
Which they did.
12
Clint never asked Lila if she’d taken a lover during her time on the other side of the Tree. It was as though there was a universe inside her husband, an arrangement of meticulously detailed and landscaped planets hanging down from wires. The planets were ideas and people. He explored them and studied them and came to know them. Except they didn’t move, didn’t rotate, didn’t change over time, the way actual bodies, astral and otherwise, did. Lila sort of understood that, knowing that once he’d lived a life where there had been nothing but movement and uncertainty, yet that didn’t mean she had to like it. Or accept it.
And how it felt to have killed Jeanette Sorley, accident though it had been? That was something he could never understand, and the few times he tried, she walked away fast, fists clenched, hating him. She did not know exactly what it was that she wanted, but it was not to be understood.
Upon waking that first afternoon, Lila drove her cruiser from Mrs. Ransom’s driveway directly to the still-smoldering prison. Tiny bits of dissolving cocoon were still clinging to her skin. She organized the removal of the attackers’ bodies and the sweeping up and disposal of police weapons and gear. The helpers she martialed in this task were, primarily, the inmates of Dooling Correctional. These women, convicted criminals who had surrendered their freedom—virtually all of whom were survivors of domestic abuse, or survivors of addiction, or survivors of poverty, or survivors of mental illness, or some combination of all four—were not unaccustomed to distasteful labor. They did what they had to. Evie had given them a choice and they had made it.
When the state authorities finally turned their attention to Dooling Correctional, the cover story had been spread and codified among the people of the town and the prison. Marauders—a heavily armed Blowtorch Brigade—had laid siege, and Dr. Clinton Norcross and his officers had defended their position heroically, assisted by the police and by volunteers such as Barry Holden, Eric Blass, Jack Albertson, and Nate McGee. Given the overarching, inexplicable fact of Aurora, this story held a little less interest than the floating women who’d washed up in Nova Scotia.
After all, it was only Appalachia.
13
“His name’s Andy. His mother died,” Lila said.
Andy was crying when she introduced him to Clint. She had retrieved him from Blanche McIntyre. His face was red and he was hungry. “I’m going to say that he was mine, that I gave birth to him. It’ll be simpler that way. My friend Jolie is a doctor. She’s already filed the paperwork.”
“Hon, people are going to know you weren’t pregnant. They won’t believe it.”
“Most will,” she said, “because time was different over there. For the rest . . . I don’t care.”
Because he saw she meant it, he held out his arms and accepted the wailing child. He rocked Andy back and forth. The baby’s screams became howls. “I think he likes me,” Clint said.
Lila didn’t smile. “He’s constipated.”
Clint didn’t want a child. He wanted a nap. He wanted to forget it all, the blood and death and Evie, especially Evie, who had bent the world, who had bent him. But the videotape was in his head; any time he wanted to do a Warner Wolf and go to it, it ran on a loop.
He remembered Lila, on that awful night when the world was burning down, informing him that she had never wanted the pool.
“Do I get a say in this?” he asked.
“No,” Lila said. “I’m sorry.”
“You don’t sound sorry.” Which was true.
14
Sometimes—usually at night when she lay wakeful, but sometimes even on the brightest afternoons—names would go through Lila’s head. They were the names of white police officers (like her) who had shot innocent black civilians (like Jeanette Sorley). She thought of Richard Haste, who had shot eighteen-year-old Ramarley Graham in the bathroom of the youth’s Bronx apartment. She thought of Betty Shelby, who killed Terence Crutcher in Tulsa. Most of all she thought of Alfred Olango, shot dead by Officer Richard Gonsalves when Olango playfully pointed a vaping device at him.
Janice Coates and other women from Our Place had tried to convince her that she’d had perfectly valid reasons for what she had done. These exhortations might or might not be true; either way, they were of no help. One question recurred like a maddening earworm: Would she have given a white woman more time? She was terribly, dreadfully afraid she knew the answer to that . . . but knew she would never be sure. The question would haunt her for the rest of her life.
Lila stayed on the job until the situation at the prison was sorted, then handed in her resignation. She brought baby Andy to Tiffany Jones Daycare and stayed to help out.
Clint was commuting to Curly, an extra hour in travel. He was fixated on his patients, especially on those inmates transferred from Dooling who had crossed over, because he was the only person they could talk to about what they’d seen and experienced who wouldn’t label them as crazy.
“Do you regret your choice?” he asked them.
They all said no.
Their selflessness astounded Clint, shrank him, kept him awake, sitting in his armchair in the AM gloom. He had risked his life, yes, but the inmates had handed their new ones over. Had made a gift of them. What group of men would ever have made such a unanimous sacrifice? No group of men was the answer, and if you recognized that, then Christ, hadn’t the women made an awful mistake?
He ate drive-thru food at both ends of his day and the softening he had worried about that spring became a healthy front porch by the following fall. Jared was a melancholy ghost, skimming at the edges of his perception, coming and going, sometimes offering a small salute or a yo, Dad. Erotic dreams of Evie rattled away any real serenity Clint might have found. She captured him in vines and blew wind across his naked body. And her body? It was a bower where he thought he could rest, but never reached before awakening.
When he was in the same room with the baby, it grinned at him, as if it wanted to make friends. Clint grinned back and found himself crying in his car on the way to work.
One night, unable to sleep, he Googled the name of his second patient, Paul Montpelier, he of the “sexual ambition.” An obituary popped up. Paul Montpelier had died five years before, after a long battle with cancer. There was no mention of a wife or children. What had his “sexual ambition” gained him? A very short and sad obituary, it seemed. Clint cried for him, too. He understood this was a well-known psychological phenomenon known as transference, and didn’t care.
One rainy evening not long after reading Montpelier’s obituary, exhausted from a day of group meetings and one-on-one consultations, Clint stopped at a motel in the little town of Eagle, where the heater rattled and everyone on the TV looked green. Three nights later, he was in the same room when Lila called his cell phone to ask if he was coming home. She didn’t sound particularly concerned about his answer.
“I think I’m beat, Lila,” he said.
Lila heard his meaning, the larger encircling defeat it conveyed.
“You’re a good man,” she said. This was a lot to give him right then. The baby didn’t sleep much. She was beat herself. “Better than most.”
He had to laugh. “I believe that’s known as damning with faint praise.”
“I do love you,” she said. “It’s just been a lot. Hasn’t it?”
It had. It had been a hell of a lot.
15
The warden at Curly told Clint he absolutely didn’t want to see his face over the Thanksgiving holiday.
“Heal thyself, Doc,” said the warden. “Eat some vegetables, anyway. Something besides Big Macs and moon pies.”
He abruptly decided to drive to Coughlin to see Shannon, but ended up parked outside her house, unable to go in. Through the thin drapes of the ranch house he observed the shadows of female figures moving. The warmth of the lights was cheerful and inviting; snow had started to fall in huge flakes. He thought of knocking on her door. He thought of saying, Hey, Shan, you were the milkshake that got away. The thought of a milkshake running away on Shannon’s shapely legs made him laugh, and he was still laughing when he drove off.
He ended up in a tavern called O’Byrne’s with melting slush on the floor, the Dubliners on the jukebox, and a bleary-eyed, white-headed bartender who moved in slow motion between the taps and the glasses, as if he were not pouring beers, but handling radioactive isotopes. This fine fellow addressed Clint. “Guinness, son? Tasty on a night like this.”
“Make it a Bud.”
The current Dubliners tune was “The Auld Triangle.” Clint knew it, and sort of liked it, in spite of himself. There was a romance to the song that was nothing like his experience of prison, but it got you, those voices gathering. Someone, he thought, ought to add another verse, though. The warden, the screw, and the lag all got turns. Where was the shrink?
He was just about to take his beer to a dark corner when a finger tapped him on the shoulder. “Clint?”
16
What did it was the hug.
Frank’s daughter didn’t just hug him when they were reunited, she dug her girl’s hands into his upper arms so that he could feel her fingernails through his shirt. Everything that had happened, everything he had done, had made it clear that he needed to do something—anything!—about himself, but that hug had tipped the dominoes. The last time he had seen her awake, he had almost ripped her favorite shirt off her body. His daughter loved him anyway. He didn’t deserve it—but he wanted to.
The anger management program was three days a week. At the first meeting, it was just Frank and the therapist in the basement of the Dooling VFW.
Her name was Viswanathan. She wore large round spectacles and was so young-looking Frank figured she didn’t remember cassette tapes. She asked why he was there.
“Because I scare my kid and I scare myself. I also trashed my marriage, but that’s just a side-effect.”
The therapist took notes as he explained his feelings and compulsions. It came more easily than Frank would have guessed, sort of like expressing pus from an infected wound. In a lot of ways, it was like talking about another person, because that pissed-off dogcatcher didn’t feel like him. That pissed-off dogcatcher was someone who showed up and took control when Frank didn’t like what was happening, when he just couldn’t deal. He told her about putting animals in cages. He kept coming back to that.
“My friend,” said Dr. Viswanathan, this twenty-six-year-old girl with glasses the color of Kool-Aid, “have you ever heard of a drug called Zoloft?”
“Are you patronizing me?” Frank wanted to get himself together, not be fucked with.
The therapist shook her head and smiled. “No, I’m being jaunty. And you’re being brave.”
She introduced him to a psychopharmacologist and the psychopharmacologist wrote Frank a prescription. He took the prescribed dosage without feeling especially different and continued to go to the meetings. Word got around, and more men began to appear, filling half the chairs in the basement of the VFW. They said they “wanted to make a change.” They said they “wanted to get their shit together.” They said they “wanted to stop being so fucking angry all the time.”
No amount of therapy or Big Pharma happy-pills could change the fact that Frank’s marriage was kaput. He had broken Elaine’s trust too many times (not to mention the kitchen wall). But maybe that part was okay. He discovered he didn’t actually like her that much. The best thing was to let her go. He gave her full custody, and told her he was grateful for his two weekends a month with their daughter. In time, if things went well, it would be more.
To his daughter he said, “I’ve been thinking about a dog.”
17
“How are you doing?” Frank asked Clint as the Dubliners played and sang.
Frank was on his way to Thanksgiving in Virginia with his former in-laws. The Zoloft and the meetings helped him control his temper, but in-laws were still in-laws, only more so when their daughter had divorced you. He’d stopped in at O’Byrne’s to postpone his execution for a half hour.
“I’m hanging in there.” Clint rubbed his eyes. “Need to lose some weight, but yeah, hanging in there.”
They took seats at a booth in a dark corner.
Frank said, “You’re drinking in an Irish dive on Thanksgiving. Is that your idea of hanging in there?”
“I didn’t say I was great. Besides, you’re here, too.”
Frank thought What the hell and just said it. “I’m glad we didn’t kill each other.”
Clint raised his glass. “I’ll drink to that.”
They toasted. Clint didn’t feel any anger toward Frank. Anger wasn’t something he felt toward anyone. What he felt was great disappointment in himself. He had not expected to save his family only to lose them. It was not his idea of a happy ending. It was his idea of an American shit-show.
He and Geary talked about their children. Frank’s girl was in love with some kid in Ohio. He was a little worried he might be a grandfather at forty-five, but he was playing it cool. Clint said that his son was awfully quiet these days, probably couldn’t wait to blow town, go to college, see what the world was like beyond coal country.
“And your wife?”
Clint waved to the bartender for another round.
Frank shook his head. “Thanks, but not for me. Booze and Zoloft don’t mix all that well. I should shove off. The outlaws are expecting me.” He brightened. “Hey, why not come along? I’ll introduce you to Elaine’s folks. Gotta keep on their good side; they’re my daughter’s grandparents, after all. Visiting them is sort of like hell, but with slightly better food.”
Clint thanked him, but declined.
Frank started to get up, then settled back. “Listen, that day at the Tree . . .”
“What about it?”
“Do you remember when the churchbells started ringing?”
Clint said he would never forget. The bells began when the women started to wake up.
“Yeah,” Frank said. “Right about then I looked around for that crazy girl, and saw she was gone. Angel, I think her name was.”
Clint smiled. “Angel Fitzroy.”
“Any idea what became of her?”
“None at all. She’s not at Curly, I know that much.”
“Barry, the insurance guy? He told me he was pretty sure she killed Peters.”
Clint nodded. “He told me the same thing.”
“Yeah? What did you say?”
“Good riddance to bad rubbish. That’s what I said. Because Don Peters was the problem in a nuthell.” He paused. “Shell. That’s what I mean. Nutshell.”
“My friend, I think you should go home.”
Clint said, “Good idea. Where is it?”
18
Two months after what had become known as the Great Awakening, a Montana rancher saw a woman hitchhiking on Route 2, just east of Chinook, and pulled over. “Hop in, young lady,” he said. “Where you headed?”
“Not sure,” she said. “Idaho, to start with. Maybe out to California after that.”
He offered his hand. “Ross Albright. Got a spread two counties over. What’s your name?”
“Angel Fitzroy.” Once she would have refused the shake, used an alias, and kept her hand on the knife she always stored in her coat pocket. Now there was no knife and no alias. She felt no need of either.
“Nice name, Angel,” he said, fetching third gear with a jerk. “I’m a Christian myself. Born and born again.”
“Good,” Angel said, and without a trace of sarcasm.
“Where you from, Angel?”
“A little town called Dooling.”
“That where you woke up?”
Once Angel would have lied and said yes, because that was easier, and besides, lying came naturally to her. It was a real talent. Only this was her new life, and she had resolved to tell the truth to the best of her ability in spite of the complications.
“I was one of the few who never went to sleep,” she said.
“Wow! You must have been lucky! And strong!”
“I was blessed,” Angel said. This was also the truth, at least as she understood it.
“Just hearing you say so is a blessing,” said the rancher, and with great feeling. “What’s next, Angel, if you don’t mind me asking? What are you going to do when you finally decide to nail your traveling shoes to the floor?”
Angel looked out at the glorious mountains and the never-ending western sky. At last she said, “The right thing. That’s what I’m going to do, Mr. Albright. The right thing.”
He took his eyes off the road long enough to smile at her and said, “Amen, sister. Amen to that.”
19
The women’s Correctional Facility was fenced off and condemned, marked with signs warning against trespassers, and left to crumble while the government allocated funds to more pressing public works. The new fence was strong, and its base was embedded deep into the turf. It took the fox several weeks of digging, and all his reserves of patience to tunnel beneath it.
Once he had accomplished this engineering feat, he trotted into the building through the massive hole in the wall and set about constructing his new den in a cell close by. He could detect the scent of his mistress there, faded but sweet and tangy.
An emissary came from the rats. “This is our castle,” the rat said. “What are your intentions, fox?”
The fox appreciated how straightforward the rat was. He was a fox, but he was getting older. Perhaps it was time to quit with tricks and risks, find a mate, and stay close to his skulk. “My intentions are humble, I assure you.”
“And they are?” pressed the rat.
“I hesitate to say aloud,” the fox said. “It’s a little embarrassing.”
“Speak,” said the rat.
“All right,” the fox said. He tipped his head shyly. “I’ll whisper it. Come up close to me and I’ll whisper it to you.”
The rat came close. The fox could have bitten her head off—it was his talent, each of God’s creatures has at least one—but he didn’t.
“I want to be at peace,” he said.