Page 33

July 2, 1997

THEY HAD THEIR MOTHER’S CAR—it had been parked in a nearby town, hidden, Una had eventually explained—and were driving away from the Red Grove. Piled high in the back seat were trash bags full of clothes, blankets, a box with plates and forks, their record player. They’d grabbed all that they could from the house, knowing they were leaving a lot, too much. Knowing also that there was no way to carry everything forward, that the heaviness was too much to bear.

What they had was a car pointed northeast, toward Sacramento, driving in the slow lane because every now and then Luce fantasized about taking the next exit, finding a pay phone, and making a call that would send other cars, their lights flashing, barreling toward the community. She could do that. She could, still. Cops with their bullhorns out, ready to dig up her mother.

But then all the other women, all the other people of the community. It was thinking about where they would go.

The community had failed her and Roo, but it had not failed everyone.

She drove on, tapping the steering wheel with a nervous twitch. Roo licked a pink smear of Pop-Tart goo from his finger, one of the many supplies Gramms had wedged into the car as they’d packed. How would she raise him all by herself? How would she do it with all this ache? She would learn that the loss doesn’t go away. It lives in you, with you, a snake around your throat, and—this is the secret nobody tells you—the coils don’t let go. You just learn to live with your ghosts.

Moose’s nose twitched out the window, taking in the new smells as the redwoods were behind them, the coastal fog disappearing into the rearview mirror as they drove higher into the foothills, past the spread of live oaks and a cluster of buzzards winging one another toward a deer carcass, past an empty high school, a shopping mall, and as the air grew drier and hotter against the car, Roo kept his eyes trained out the window, taking in the new shapes of the world.

They stayed in a Motel 6 in Sacramento while they looked for an apartment. The stink of bleach, old smoke, the plastic feel of the blanket. That’s just a person, Luce would tell herself when they passed a man who looked at them a little too long, when someone hollered out a car window at her. She started to throw her middle finger in the air at the car, gut reaction, but caught herself before she’d gone all the way. Hell, what did she know about how those sorts of things were reacted to out here? This was the land of the statistics.

She’d taken her mom’s shoebox of money from her closet, but even with that, matching dinnerware was stupidly expensive. Every apartment building they could afford had at least one skeezy-looking guy lurking nearby. The screens affixed to the windows were torn or easy to pop out if someone wanted to break in, and the sun, without the cover of trees, scalded their scalps. Still. “This could be nice,” she told Roo as they toured apartments. “We could make it okay.”

Roo didn’t talk much, said, monotone, he liked each place the same amount, but where would he ride his bike? Or catch frogs? And did she really think Moosey would be okay out here? And how would they know what kind of pizza to order without Gramms, and didn’t she think Juan would miss them?

Late at night, Roo shook her awake. She gasped, asked what was wrong, her heart racing, feeling around for the carved bone she kept beneath the pillow. Roo said, whispering, that it was too quiet. Luce listened. Roar of truck on the highway, car door slamming in the parking lot, TV murmurs from the room next door. This was the loudest place they’d ever lived, she told him.

“No, not like that,” he said. “I can’t hear things out here. I can’t hear her.”

They stayed six nights, then she drove them back.

Much later, Luce and Roo are crouched between their old wooden garden beds, overrun with weeds at the moment. Luce has not kept the plants watered, and so as they’ve wilted, the dry-loving filaree, foxtail, and mallow have sprouted up and grown fast, overtaking the tomatoes.

Neither Luce nor Roo is looking at the garden, though. They are staring down at the ground between them, where a small box turtle is hiding in its shell. Roo extends his hand toward the turtle’s head. He is holding a slice of apple, making kissy sounds with his mouth.

Above them, their old deck creaks in the shadows of the redwood trees. They glance up, catch a wave from Gramms as she finishes her cigarette before she turns back into the house—she’s promised meat loaf tonight, which they’ve only read about, a sort of compressed square of hamburger allegedly; they can’t wait. And then there’s the faintest click from the window above the garden, and Luce looks up. She can make out the silhouette of the mummy perched on a chair, melon head long discarded and replaced with a soccer ball, a photograph taped on its surface: Gloria’s and Gem’s faces up close, cheek to cheek, their eyes sparkling into the camera.

Under Luce’s and Roo’s feet, moles dig between the interwoven blanket of roots, dead matter relaxes back into the earth. Juan, his hands around his mouth, hollers up at Luce and Roo from the bottom of the cracked driveway. “I’m about to patch up my moon mask—got kinda broken last time. Want me to patch up either of yours before tonight?”

“Nah,” Luce tells him—theirs are in good shape.

“Anyway, you may not need yours anymore, Goose,” he says. “Una didn’t always wear one.”

Luce shrugs. She hasn’t decided how much to keep the same, what to change.

Clouds passing overhead shadow her face. There is so much to untangle. The mess of kids Una was claiming. What story to tell in the reenactments. Who to tell the whole truth—

Juan waved, turned to walk back down the hill.

For tonight, she is going to try something new. She’d been practicing with a few of the kids. They’d focus the story on one regular week in the life of the women, call it “The Story of the Sisters,” Tamsen and Ines and the others working together to plant a garden, to make peace with mountain lions—a story about how they built community. About the people doing the work of caring for one another. She wouldn’t dispel the protective myth—not yet, probably not ever—but maybe she could redirect the wonder.

She isn’t sure the people will like it, with so much less drama and violence. But she’ll try. They’ll try it.

Una had left a note. In her absence, the next leader was to be Luce Shelley.

And Luce, calling a community gathering right away, said that her first and only announcement as leader was that they’d all vote to elect a council to run this place. And, looking across at these faces, taking in who actually lived here, listening, yes, listening to the women she loved and also the men, not just to the stories of horror but also the stories of love, she said that while the council would remain majority women, they’d always have at least one man.

She has a small stack of catalogs on the kitchen table, their covers showing students smiling on wide lawns, laughing in the shade of big trees. There are three community colleges within driving distance. She will bring those catalogs to a meeting soon as well. That and the other list of ideas she’s been compiling—Amish quilts, Mennonite furniture, the isolated group out in Utah who farm lavender. They could make a business. They could give, connect beyond the boundary. Be seen.

She had been trying to explain the whole thing to herself, to imagine how she might one day tell the story to someone else. But there was no clarifying moment of insight, no revelation that she’d been wrong to be afraid of the outside world. All that she knew about serial killers and rapists and human traffickers and pedophiles, all the suffering she’d heard women tell about their own lives at reenactments, all of it was still true. It was real. What had happened to Gem was real.

And what was also true was that out past the boundary of the Red Grove, there were college psychology courses—ha, she could probably use a few of those—and aquariums with real beluga whales and the salt flats of Utah and wild horses on some island in North Carolina and billions of people, and most of them—not all, but most—would not hurt you.

The turtle pokes his head halfway out the shell. Roo squeals. “Did you hear him?” Roo asks, looking up at Luce’s face. She raises her eyebrows, strains an ear toward the turtle. Roo adds, “He said, ‘I’m starving.’”

“Well, I guess we need more apples,” she says, and he looks up at her, his grin as wide as a frog’s. Above them, three flies buzz in slow, drowsy circles, and above that, a jay dives for a dragonfly, and farther up still, higher than the mats of moss in the canopy, on the highest point of the closest hill, a mountain lion swivels her ear toward them, listening, then walks on, yawning, toward the shadow ahead.