Chapter 6
SIX
In some alternate universe, I’d luxuriate in feelings of guilt and ideas of atonement, indulging in various ways to somehow make peace with the fact that I killed a man who might have—maybe even most likely—been trying to help me. Maybe I’d meditate or plant a tree or summon a prayer. I’d let go of my bad feelings, surrender them to the universe, accept my guilt as well as my release from it.
But that is not this world, and so I slip the photo back in the visor, barely glancing at the Bible verse written on an index card next to it. Habakkuk3:17–18 , the reference reads, but it’s not one I know, not that I know many at all. I’m not about to look up this one.
I walk away from the truck without looking back.
“So, what’s the plan?” I ask Daniel briskly, clenching my hands into fists at my sides before I deliberately uncurl them. Sam is standing nearby, watching us both, his expression wary yet alert. “We leave tomorrow for Port Granby?”
Daniel glances at me, his expression both guarded and appraising, clearly trying to gauge my mood. I feel determined but anxious, strong yet fragile, like I could splinter into a million pieces and yet still keep going. I lift my chin as I keep his gaze. “Well?”
“I thought we said we’d stay here for a few more days?” he asks. “Gather food, let Kyle rest, make sure we have what we need for the journey.”
“The longer we stay here, the more supplies we’ll use,” I point out. And we don’t have that many, maybe not even enough, to begin with. But it isn’t really our supplies I’m thinking about; it’s this edginess inside me. I’m not sure why, but I feel an urge to move , maybe just to escape the memories that I already know will come with me.
“That’s true,” Daniel replies equably enough, “but we can live off the land here, for a little while at least. Trap, fish, hunt.”
I eye him skeptically. He’s a pretty good shot, but he hasn’t, as far as I know, lived off the land the way we’d been doing before I let the cottage burn to the ground. And while we did bring a couple of rabbit snares and fishing poles with us, it’s not like we’ll be living large on what we can eke out here in the woods.
A tiny smile quirks Daniel’s mouth as he seems to read my thought process with the accuracy that only comes with twenty years of marriage. “You know I’ve always wanted to be on one of those TV survival shows,” he reminds me. “This is my big chance.”
A laugh escapes me, an unruly, unexpected sound. “Okay,” I reply. After all, the journey to Port Granby and beyond is fraught with uncertainty and danger. Why would I rush into such a thing? I crave safety, and this is probably the closest we’re going to get to it…until we reach that base, if it even exists. And yet…we have to catch a lot of fish, and trap a ton of rabbits, just to keep our bellies even half-full. “Okay,” I say again, and then, doing my best to keep my voice light and my manner relaxed, and probably failing at both, I turn to Sam. “Can I talk to you for a sec? ”
“Wh…what?” He hunches his shoulders away from me, looks both startled and reluctant.
“Just a second, Sam. That’s all.” I take hold of his elbow like he’s a little boy and lead him a little bit away from the campsite to the privacy provided by the drooping boughs of a nearby cedar.
The pungent smell of the needles, with their distinctive notes of balsam and camphor, brings me right back to my childhood, when I’d made a fort under a cedar tree at the cottage. I can picture the little set-up I had—a rough wooden stool, an old medicine cupboard my dad gave me to store my treasures—a pinecone, a smooth stone, a jagged piece of bright blue robin’s eggshell. I blink the memories away and look at my son.
“Sam, I’m sorry about yesterday,” I tell him. I keep my tone quietly matter-of-fact. “The shooting. The killing.” Just like Mattie, I’m going to be blunt. Now is not the time for euphemisms. “I know it was shocking?—”
“Mom.” He cuts me off, sounding both impatient and disgusted. “You don’t know anything.”
I blink, doing my best to absorb that statement and whatever it means. “Maybe not,” I agree evenly, “but you haven’t been yourself with me since yesterday?—”
“Mom!” he interjects again, and now he sounds angry. “Yesterday people died , our house burned down…I mean, what do you expect ?”
It’s the same sentiment Mattie expressed, but with far more fury.
I take a deep breath and then let it out slowly. “I know all that, Sam, believe me,” I tell him levelly. “I just…I just want to make sure we’re good.” I gesture to the space between us while my son’s lip curls. For a second, I experience the dizzying sensation of some kind of time warp; we could be in the basement rec room of our old house, the deep-pile carpet littered with dirty socks and cereal bowls, Sam slouched in the L-shaped leather sofa, the two of us arguing about when he’s going to turn off his PlayStation and go to bed.
“We’re good,” he states flatly, and then he turns and walks away, not back to the campsite but further into the woods. Even though my instinct, my need , is to call him back and keep him safe, I let him go.
I’d wanted to clear the air, but I feel like everything I said was wrong and just made things more complicated between us. At least I tried, I tell myself, and I walk back to where Mattie is playing pat-a-cake with Phoebe.
“Do you want a break?” I ask her. “I can play with Phoebe for a little while.” I glance at the little girl, who gives me the same serious-eyed, wary look as before. I don’t think she wants to play with me.
Mattie shakes her head. “We’re good,” she says, and I wonder if she overheard Sam say the same thing. My children are brushing me off again, but maybe I just need to let them do it. Everyone processes in different ways. Maybe this is part of it, even if it hurts.
I spend the afternoon collecting plants with Ruby; she brings along her book and gives me a tutorial in various specimens, although I feel pretty hopeless at it all. They all look the same to me—green and weedy—but Ruby has a knack for telling the difference between them, even different kinds of the same plant, which is a good thing because staghorn sumac can be used as a spice or made into a tea, but poison sumac is, as the name suggests, poisonous. The only way to tell the difference is from the edges of the leaves. I’m putting a lot of trust in my twelve-year-old daughter, but her quiet confidence both inspires and soothes me, especially after that confrontation with Sam.
By late afternoon, we have collected a whole range of plants with different uses—cleavers to grind into coffee, sumac for tea and seasoning, pineapple-weed to sprinkle on any fresh meat we get to keep it from spoiling, and narrow-leaved plantain, whose leaves can be boiled, its seeds dried and ground into flour. I’m both encouraged by how much there is that’s edible and dispirited at just how much effort it all takes. We’ve gathered enough plantain to make about a tablespoon of flour from its seeds, and a pot of boiled leaves is not, I already know, a satisfying dinner. Still, it’s progress, and Ruby seems very pleased with our haul.
Back at the campsite, Phoebe is curled up on a sleeping bag, fast asleep, her thumb plugged into her mouth, and I can’t see anyone else around. For a second, panic seizes me like a vise, makes it hard to breathe. Where are they all?
Then I see a dark head in the front of the truck, and I realize Mattie is sitting on the driver’s side, Kyle half-seated, half-slumped next to her as they chat. I stride over to the truck and stand in the open doorway of the driver’s side, my hands on my hips. “Where are Dad and Sam?” I ask Mattie, my voice coming out sharper than I mean it to because of my fear.
Mattie’s eyes widen in surprise and then flash with annoyance. “Dad and Sam went to set some rabbit snares,” she tells me in a tone that suggests she wants me gone, now . Kyle gives me a half-hearted smile and tries to sit up a little more.
I glance between the two of them and something in me startles, shifts; there’s a companionship, even an intimacy, between them that I haven’t seen before. Mattie generally tolerated Kyle, had a certain long-suffering sympathy for his general air of patheticness, but she didn’t like him. They weren’t friends, except, I recall, they did work together on the smokehouse, and Mattie taught Kyle how to shoot, seeming to enjoy being the one in the know.
A dozen other memories shuffle through my mind like a pack of cards—Mattie and Kyle having a lively debate about the best Archie comics in the loft, relics from my own childhood. Daring each other to jump in the lake a few weeks ago, even though the water was absolutely freezing. Banging out songs together on the very old, very out-of-tune piano on the porch, collapsing into gales of laughter at how bad they both sounded.
I’m stupefied, disquieted too, although I’m not sure why. Why shouldn’t they be friends…or even something more? Not that I think that’s what is going on here, exactly, but…I suppose it could be a possibility, one day. It’s not like there are a lot of others…and yet I resist. I’m not ready, not remotely ready, to deal with that kind of complication.
“Hey,” I say to Kyle, several seconds too late. “You seem to be feeling better.”
“Yeah.” He smiles shamefacedly, like it was his fault for getting shot. “My shoulder’s pretty sore still, but I think I’ll be up and at it tomorrow. I can help with some stuff, maybe.”
“You take your time,” I reassure him. I glance at Mattie and see that she is scowling at me. “How long has Phoebe been asleep?” I ask.
She shrugs. “An hour?”
Is that how long Mattie’s been in this truck with Kyle? Again the disquiet, and I tell myself not to be stupid about this. I alienated my daughter once already because of a bad boyfriend, back in Connecticut; I’m not about to do it again, and besides, Kyle isn’t actually her boyfriend or bad. There is absolutely no need to overreact about this; in some ways, it’s almost funny, the age-old reaction of a mother to stumbling across her daughter sitting a little too close to a boy, never mind the nuclear holocaust we’re living through.
“Okay,” I say, and, with Mattie still giving me a stare simmering with resentment, I finally back off.
Ruby and I spend the next hour making dinner, which is another hodgepodge stew of root vegetables we gathered, a potato or two from our limited supply, and a tiny bit of dried meat. I hope Daniel and Sam’s snares work, because we could definitely all do with some protein; just as I feared, living off the land is not going to feed us properly for very long, if at all.
I haven’t looked in a mirror lately, and I avoided the ones at the cottage after the first few months, because things were hard enough without having to study my grim reflection. I know my hair is now almost entirely gray; coarse too, most likely from a lack of calcium. My skin is weathered and dry, my face seamed with deeper lines and wrinkles, and a few weeks ago I spat out a tooth that had come loose, again most likely from a calcium deficiency. At least it was a molar rather than one in the front of my mouth, I told myself, but it had felt shocking, like something that shouldn’t happen to someone like me—a middle-class woman with a very good dentist and a certain appearance to keep up, although of course none of that counts for anything now.
At least I’ve shed the stubborn ten pounds that had stuck around my middle for the last five years. Thanks to a diet of dried meat and meals like cattail porridge, I’m wiry and lean, verging on positively stringy. I’ve had to hold my shorts up with a piece of twine; my hips jut out like a supermodel’s, without any of the accompanying gloss or glamor.
When Sam and Daniel come back a little while later, they have no rabbit, although they’re hopeful there will be something in the snares tomorrow. Daniel is quietly approving of Ruby’s industry, rumpling her hair, and is rewarded with a shyly beaming smile. Mattie sidles out of the truck and comes up to me as I get out the plates for dinner.
“Honestly, Mom, you are so embarrassing,” she hisses. “I could totally tell what you were thinking!” Her face is flushed, her tone melodramatically indignant. “As if I’d have Kyle for my boyfriend! Come on !”
“Okay,” I reply cautiously, but she is already flouncing away.
I shake my head as I catch Daniel’s bemused gaze.
“What was that about?” he asks.
“Typical teenaged drama,” I reply with a smile, and he laughs, a soft sound that makes me ache because it reminds me of how we used to be, finding humor amid the hardness, sharing each other’s thoughts, not even needing to say them out loud. I want that Daniel back, even though I’d been so angry at him for hiding so much from me—the loss of his job, the second mortgage, our house being given back to the bank. None of that matters now. I just want to see my husband smile. I want to laugh with him; I want to feel his arms around me. We’ve barely touched since he returned with Sam; I’m not sure we’d even know how.
Over the next few days, however, I start to get glimpses of how Daniel and I used to be, and, more importantly, how we could be. The warm weather holds, and the days are full of gathering plants, picking berries, grinding seeds into flour, and boiling what still look like weeds to me for whatever purpose Ruby has determined. Daniel and Sam come back with two rabbits, and the next day Kyle, who still moves gingerly, wincing at the pain in his shoulder, is most definitely on the mend, and even manages to catch three small brook trout. We fry them up nice and crispy, picking through the tiny bones for the succulent bits of flesh.
It’s not really enough food, but we all act like it is, because we all need a break from the anxiety, the fear and even the hunger. This feels, almost, like a vacation, even though it is anything but. The future looms in front of us, enormous and uncertain, but for a few days everybody is willing not to think about it.
Phoebe sticks close to Mattie, who has taken on all mothering duties; the little girl far prefers my daughter to me. I tell myself I don’t mind, but part of me does. I’m the mom, I think, except of course when it comes to Phoebe I’m not, and I’m not sure I even want to be.
In the midst of all this busyness, there are surprisingly, and thankfully, moments of both joy and grace. We all go swimming, and Daniel even fashions a rope swing from the branch of a basswood that hangs over the stream that Mattie and Sam both jump on, while Kyle watches, not willing to risk injuring his shoulder. Daniel surprises us all by agreeing to have a try. Watching my husband sail out over the water with a holler makes me laugh; it really is starting to feel like a vacation. As he emerges from the stream, shaking the droplets of water from his hair, he smiles at me.
That night, Daniel and I lie tangled together in our tent, with Sam and Kyle sharing the other one, the girls in the truck. Daniel puts his hand on my stomach like a question, and then, when I let out the tiniest of sighs, slides it upward. I arch into him, craving the feel of his arms around me, the comforting solidness of his body, although as I hold him I realize that, like me, he has become wiry and lean. His lips brush my hair. As we move together, neither of us speaks.
The next morning I’m still lying in my sleeping bag, the sun streaming through the crack in the tarp, turning the makeshift tent into a sauna, when I hear it—the sound of a motor, a distant purr, barely audible. I’m out of the tent in seconds, wild with panic, fired with purpose. Daniel, I see, is half-dressed, rifle in hand. No one else is awake.
“A car?” I ask in a low voice, and he nods.
“Or something.”
“How close?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t know.”
We both dress quickly as the sound of the engine, wherever it is, fades in and out. First it seems to be coming from the east, then the west. It feels as if we are being circled; perhaps it’s going around the main road that rings the park. There’s no reason to think they’ll find us; we drove across a field and parked in the woods. We haven’t seen a sign of anyone in all the time we’ve been here.
And yet the sound of the engine drones on.
My skin grows clammy and my heart rate, which has leveled out these last few days, picks up its panicked pace. We were so happy here , I think, so briefly . Why does it have to end?
As the noise of the vehicle, whatever it is, continues, Daniel and I decide to wake up the others just in case. The dazed sleepiness of early morning is replaced by instant alertness and a focused kind of panic. Ruby gathers our food supplies, and Kyle and Sam pack up the tents, Kyle moving slowly thanks to his shoulder. Mattie, with Phoebe on her hip, tosses the sleeping bags into the back of the truck. The sound of the engine is getting louder, fading out less. Whoever it is, they’re definitely getting closer.
Are they looking for us?
Daniel, Sam, Kyle, and I all act as lookouts, while the girls are ready to go, sitting in the truck.
“I can shoot, too,” Mattie argues, but I shake my head, firm, as I guide her inside.
“Phoebe needs you.”
My daughter doesn’t argue with that; the little girl’s arms are wrapped around her neck.
Daniel crouches behind the open door on the driver’s side of the truck; Sam is perched in the fork of a nearby birch tree. I stand on the other side of the truck, half-hidden by the bumper. Kyle is behind a thicket of sumac. He’s not healed enough to hold a rifle but Daniel, Sam, and I are all armed, our rifles trained on the stretch of open meadow we drove across to get to this hidden woodland by the stream, our brief oasis in this desert world.
The grass that had been flattened by the truck has sprung up now; there’s no way to know anyone was here at all, and yet we can hear the steady hum of a vehicle, growing louder with every second, and yet barely audible over the rush of blood in my ears. It’s as if they know we’re here, hidden by the trees, yet how could they?
Then a vehicle comes into view—a gleaming black SUV, like something from the Connecticut suburbs. It bumps along the meadow straight toward us, and my finger twitches on the trigger.
I’m not going to make the same mistake twice, I tell myself, and yet, if I hold back, will it be too late? Whoever is driving the car can’t be a friend. They’re coming right at us. They must have been looking for us, I think, even though that doesn’t make sense—and this car doesn’t look like it came from Corville. It has New York state plates, for one, and, as it turns, I see, incongruously, a bumper sticker that states the owner of the car is a Proud Parent of a Haldane Middle Schooler .
I glance at Daniel, but he’s focused on the car, which has now come to a stop in the middle of the meadow, a mere hundred yards or so away. The driver cuts the engine, and in the ensuing stillness I hear the trill of a cardinal, like a warning. We all wait, guns ready, hearts beating.
The driver opens the door of the car.