Chapter 4
No howling ghosts or slinking demons emerge from the forest when we walk through the gate. No haunting instrumentals erupt to herald my trip into a cursed dimension. No whispers of leaves crunching under the feet of a murderer.
I do hear Emma berating me.
What is wrong with you, Lou? Do you want to die?
My internal Emma shuts up when I answer, Yeah, sometimes I do. Sometimes the urge to no longer exist feels like the only thing that belongs to me.
The trees are tall and thick-leaved. Since a lot of the sunlight is blocked by the canopy there isn’t much vegetation on the forest floor other than ferns, leggy bushes, and other shade-tolerant plants. A lot of raspberry thorns and honey locust spikes. Sharp things growing in dim light.
The path itself is pockmarked with dark puddles of standing water, full of last year’s leaves and floating cicada corpses.
Ripley’s initial overwhelming excitement of being in a new place with new smells fades after ten minutes of walking. Instead of jumping from one patch of grass to the other, she snuffs slowly through leaves and fallen branches, glancing back at me to make sure I’m still there.
“Ack!” I say when she tries to lap at one of the puddles. She looks back at me as if to ask why I’m being so cruel. “It’s gross, that’s why.”
Talking to my dog is one of the things Jena and Arden didn’t seem to understand when I used to tell them stories about my life.
What else am I supposed to talk about when we’re sitting around the lunch table?
Children? I have none. Dating? Hard pass.
The deterioration of the nation and the growing wealth gap? Hell no.
Jena finds a way to link whatever I say to Ascent.
As far as I can tell, Ascent is 30 percent bootstraps and pulling yourself up by them; 30 percent the soul-deep fear of never making back the cost you’ve sunk into classes and retreats and seminars; and 40 percent telling people the reason the world has not been saved is because you (specifically you) have not yet devoted yourself to becoming as rich as humanly possible and donating your excess wealth to charities doing maximally efficient work—also known as effective altruism; and until you (specifically you) decide to commit every second of every day to hustling, the world and everyone in it will continue to suffer and die.
It is just so extremely convenient and purely a coincidence that the quickest way to amass wealth is by becoming your own small business owner by selling Ascent classes to the people who need it most: your friends and family!
The Ascent Discovery Weekend left me feeling jangled and raw. Three days, Friday to Sunday, 8 AM to 8 PM. Workshop after class after breakout session—all about you, your faults, the power of your own brain. They crack you open just to empty you out, and then fill you up again.
“It’s going to peel back all that armor, babe,” Jena told me on the very first morning. “But we’ll both be here for you.”
And they were.
Either Jena or Arden met me in the conference hall for breakfast with a latte or Americano each morning.
They sat with me while I sipped my drink and ate a bagel, and they asked questions about how I was feeling, what I thought about the workshops.
All three of us met for lunch. Every day.
Their focus was entirely on me. It felt like being held.
And then it was over. I got home, took a shower, and the magic of the hot water on my skin brought me right back down to earth.
“It’s a thousand bucks,” my mom had said the day before the weekend.
She was sitting at her usual spot at the kitchen table. A thin line of smoke drifted from the end of her cigarette. It was quickly swept out the window by a cool spring breeze.
“You know what we could do with a thousand bucks? Used to be you could get a Tony Robbins book for fifteen dollars in the eighties. Same junk in that book as this three-day bullshit.”
“I know,” I said, stirring sugar into my coffee a little more aggressively than strictly necessary. “It’s just what you’re supposed to do. Like, networking or something. It’s all part of my corporate-ladder-climbing plan.”
“I don’t understand any of that. You shouldn’t do things you don’t like just ’cause you think you need to take care of me. I can take care of myself. I’ve been doing it my whole life.”
She flicked her cigarette on the edge of her ashtray too hard. She was angry—the sort of angry that could only be defined by the few things at which it wasn’t aimed. That was almost exclusively me and Ripley.
We’d had this conversation before. Just like all those other times, I didn’t know what to say.
After all she’d told me—about being kicked out of the house at sixteen by her alcoholic parents, about dropping out of high school, how much it hurt that sometimes patients told her she was stupid for being just an STNA—I didn’t understand how she could expect I’d want to do anything else other than take care of her.
I leaned down to hug her one-armed. She leaned into it, then away.
So, yeah, I agreed the whole personal development, self-help thing was woo-woo bullshit. But if it put me in their good graces? I’d grit my teeth and do it.
I focus on walking and throwing an increasingly slobbery stick for Ripley instead of work thoughts.
The concept of these hills being older than bones makes sense when you’re walking through them. Trees in this area are tall. Some are so thick a person could wrap their arms around them and their fingertips wouldn’t touch.
It’s less the growth that gives the feeling of age. It’s more the smell. Age in these hills smells like ozone and earth; it smells like pulped green matter and trickling streams hidden under fallen leaves; it feels like the vibrating pulse of thousands of cicadas in the trees.
At the end of the road sits the charred skeleton of a house.
Grass as tall as a person and other flowering plants have reclaimed the space.
There’s a sweet smell in the air, mixed with the metal tang of nutrient-rich soil.
It’s all kind of beautiful actually—the blackened bones of a former home rising out of new growth.
A big oak tree, felled by some storm, lies to the left. I climb up onto it to get a better vantage for the pictures. I line up the shot, shoot from a few angles, and wish I had something to draw the scene with.
Ripley tears through the grass in erratic shapes, doing her best impersonation of a jumping gazelle. I watch her, feeling light and airy and happy because I get to inhabit such a beautiful place with my ridiculous dog.
That’s when I see the small mound of hair and skin that used to be an animal.
The air is so pregnant with the constant drone of cicadas that the buzz of flies didn’t even register. Up on this log, the crushed circle of grass and the corpse sprawled through the center is perfectly visible.
The raccoon’s chest is split open. White rib bones and yellow fat dot the red expanse of fresh, glistening blood. Strips of skin and tufts of hair litter the ground. Its front leg lies a few feet away. The flesh is ragged where the limb was ripped from its body.
Beyond the raccoon is another patch of crushed grass. What lies within is darker and smaller but similarly mangled. A third circle of flattened grass sits halfway between the log and the house. It’s far enough away to be mostly obscured by the wildflowers and grass.
Whatever’s in it is larger than the two decimated bodies.
A gust of wind moves through the meadow. The grass around the larger body sways and separates enough to offer a two-second glimpse inside.
A coyote, its head low and snout dark, stares through the vegetation. It’s big. Taller than Ripley. Its legs are thin, but long. They terminate at an emaciated body covered in a coat of mangy, tufted hair.
The air goes still. The coyote becomes a dark shape obscured by the grass once more.
Ripley is no longer running. Her nose is in the air, twitching. She shifts so she’s facing the direction of the coyote.
“Ripley,” I say, hushed. Her ear twitches, but she doesn’t budge. “Ripley, come.”
One beat, another, her nose keeps twitching. A third beat, and finally she walks to me.
Relief is a visceral rush. I’ve never been so glad to have spent hours upon hours on her training. The good feeling is immediately doused by the coyote’s growl. It’s low and unsteady. Almost warbling.
I step off the fallen oak and immediately regret losing sight of the coyote’s shadow in the grass. It’s a false sense of safety, being able to see the danger.
My mom got me a can of pepper spray when I started going on hikes with Ripley.
I put it in the side pocket of my backpack and never touched it again.
Now, I uncap it and hold it at the ready.
The hatchet is an option, but only as a last resort.
I’m the one that interrupted its lunch. The coyote is just being a coyote.
Plus, it’d need to be too damn close for it to be effective.
I back up toward the path. Not running, but not slowly either. Ripley sticks close. Though her fur is up and she keeps looking over her shoulder.
We’re almost at the path when the coyote steps from the meadow. I freeze at the sight of it. Probably a bad idea. Probably I should keep moving, but I don’t. Instead, I stop and stare.
Lines of drool drip from its mouth. Something, mud or maybe dried blood, coats the animal’s legs and stomach. Whatever it is, it’s dark. Almost black.
The coyote takes a few quick steps forward, then stops. It opens its mouth wide, wider, wider still like it’s trying to crack its jaw but can’t. It bites at the air and that too seems unsatisfying, because it does it again.
This is not a coyote guarding its meal. This animal is sick.
Not just sick. Rabid.
It wavers sideways, then abruptly sits, revealing its profile. The coyote’s back leg has been entirely degloved. Raw, red flesh stretches from the animal’s paw to midway up its thigh.
What could have done something like that? A sympathetic shiver catches in my chest. How must that have felt? The sensation of skin rending from the meat underneath. I hope its brain was already thoroughly cooked when it happened.
I let out a shaky breath and keep backing up. It continues to flex its jaw and stare into the middle distance, seemingly unaware of our presence.
In a few yards we’ll be out of sight down a slight curve in the road. Maybe this’ll end up being nothing more than a good story to tell at real estate conferences. Katsaros will joke about my employer-provided insurance being top-notch if I do need a rabies shot. Everyone will laugh and laugh.
Of course, this is when the coyote chooses to stand. It wavers. For a second it looks like it’s about to sit again.
Instead, it swings its head to look at us.
And then it starts running.