“They’re defending their land,” said Abraham.
“But there’s a reason the FBI is up there. That family has a stockpile of weapons and a history of making threats against non-whites.”
Abraham’s eyes narrowed. “Why are you here?”
“The bell rang.”
“The bell for the Homesteaders.”
“I wanted to make sure you were all okay.” Marta looked to Gabby then. “Are you okay?”
Gabby lifted her chin. Marta looked back at Abraham, then nodded a goodbye. The screen door screamed shut at her heels.
89
“No, Mama, no, I want to play with you. I want to play you the big baby and I the mommy and I screaming.”
I got up before the sun and the Mother and I had our turn together, the private slop of me inside her, her quips, her gulps, her hiccups, before the rest of them roused. Now Issy shuffles down with Sekou, but it’s far too early for either of them. She tries to tiptoe him through the living room, where Xavier and Cornelia are still sleeping.
“No, Mama, no! I no take off my diaper!”
“You need to use the potty.”
“No, no, Mama, I no use the potty!” Sekou shimmies off of her when they hit the kitchen. His diaper swings low over the linoleum floor. Issy glares at him. I take him into my arms right there on the ground, nostrils filling with salty baby piss smell. Issy shuffles to the bathroom. I sing to him, his favorite verse of “A Horse Named Bill,” seven times.
She loves to laugh and when she smiles
You just see teeth for miles and miles
And tonsils
And spareribs
And things too fierce to mention
I press my forehead into his, keep my voice quiet so it won’t wake Cornelia. The little boy yawns and leans into me. His breath deepens. But the sound of the bathroom door opening brings him awake and he presses off of me, eyes clicking wide. He races to that precious Playmobil ambulance.
“Go back to sleep,” I say to Issy. “I’ve got him.” I appear virtuous, but really, I’ve burned up more words in the past two days than I usually do in a year. I can feel the world straining outside the house, a press of energetic need, calling to me in a way it hasn’t in so long. I’m going to have to go back out, which requires intention and attention so I can’t afford extra conversation, not even with Issy.
When she finally goes, he says, “I a doggy, Saski.” I spread a slab of sourdough with a thick paste of Nutella and put it on a plate on the floor. The little doggy wags.
90
“Sammy Weaver.” Abraham lit a piece of paper which held the dead boy’s name.
We repeated “Sammy Weaver Sammy Weaver Sammy Weaver” as the paper flashed into ash, then ducked off into the autumn wind. The eleven-day Ruby Ridge siege was over, ended peacefully enough, if you didn’t count that poor dog, and little Sammy Weaver, and his mother. We blew into our hands, and thrust them into our jacket pockets.
“What can you learn from that warrior child? He was your age. He used his shotgun to keep his family safe.” The wind whipped our hair.
“I know where Gabby keeps the shotgun,” Issy said.
Abraham put his hand on the back of her neck. “Your teenage hearts are built for fighting. You know what you love and you don’t think twice about defending it. Joan of Arc—she was that kind of warrior. And Sammy Weaver—he died protecting his home.”
“Saskia has the hatchet,” said Issy. “She’s getting good at hitting her marks.” On my other side, Xavier mumbled something to Ben, who grunted in assent, but the wind carried off their words.
“I’m glad you’re thinking along these lines,” said Abraham. “I’ll confess I’ve been growing afraid.”
“You have?” Issy said.
“The time has come to make concrete plans to defend ourselves when the Thinged World comes calling. Not if—when. We may have to keep these special plans to ourselves. Some of the others might not understand.”
“I can’t kill anyone,” Cornelia said.
“You’re not going to kill anyone,” Xavier said. The word “kill” in his mouth was full of nails.
“You can sing, Cornelia,” Abraham said. “Goddess knows, if it comes to a standoff, we’ll need joy.”
Xavier broke away. His footsteps cracked a branch.
“We’re not done,” said Abraham.
“I’m done,” Xavier replied, his long stride spilling onto the trail. Ben looked after him, then back at Abraham, then back into the forest. And then he followed Xavier down the path.
Abraham kept his eyes there long after it was strange to keep still. “Marta?”
Sure enough, Marta stepped out from behind a birch at the edge of the trail, her hands up in surrender. The boys had run right by her.
“Spying on us?”
She clasped her small hands before her. “Out for a walk.”
“You’re not needed.”
“You forget yourself. I’m not one of your devotees.” Was that what I was?
“You forget yourself,” he replied. “This is not your land.”
She kept her eyes on him, as though to say, I know you. As though to say, this is not who you are. Then she cast him aside. “Saskia,” she said, “do you want to come foraging?”
“Did you know, children, that Marta has befriended the sheriff?”
“So you’re the one spying on me.”
“These children,” he said, “have seen what the law does. Poor little Sammy Weaver. Guns. Violence. All in the name of believing it can offer children something safer than what we have here.” He held up his hands, to gesture to the maple leaves above us, the quickening thrash of squirrel tails, the beetles flying, the pine needles sweeping down to the forest floor.
Later, us girls slurped butternut soup in the empty Main Lodge. Sarah fussed from the kitchen: “Are you sure you didn’t see the boys anywhere? They’ve gone into the Thinged World, I just know it.”
“Let them be foolish,” Gabby said, at the screen door. “It’s the way we learn.”
Nora skipped around our table, singsonging: “Foolish, foolish, the boys are being foolish.” Dog chased her until Sarah grabbed him by his makeshift collar and turned him out.
After dishes, there was still no sign of Ben or Xavier. Issy and Cornelia and I wandered through the darkness to the flagpole. It wasn’t freezing out there, but it was close. Butterfly’s tapestries glowed over Abraham’s windows. I strained to overhear, but it was quiet in there.
Finally, we made out two forms coming back up the drive. Xavier was ahead by a quarter mile. We stood to greet him but he strode past us and didn’t look back, not even when we said his name. We had to wait for Ben. Cornelia went to him, as if he was hers.
“He ran from JimBob’s.” Ben’s breath plumed. “His dad’s gone.”
“Well, yeah.” I didn’t like how close he was standing to Cornelia.
“From New York.” He was irritated. “No one at the gallery has seen Philip since he dropped his paintings off a week ago. He’s not at the loft either.”
“What about Xavier’s mother?” Cornelia said. “Xavier should call her.”
“She’s in Bali? I think he said Bali. He wouldn’t talk to me after that.”
We stayed out at the flagpole. The stars were sparklers. I knew I should go down to Xavier, but no matter what I did, talk to him or not, ask him to tell me what had happened or not, sleep or stay up, he wouldn’t like me. And it was nice to feel Ben close in the night, to shiver beside him and pretend I wasn’t cold. We told stories, which got us around to him and Nora putting a frog in Sarah’s shoe once, and how she’d yelled at them. “She was so angry about it the next day,” he said. “Honestly, I didn’t think she could get angry. She scolds us all the time. But angry? Like that? It was just a frog.”
Abraham came out of his cabin. We lifted our heads, the same way deer come to attention when headlights sweep them. He said: “She’s dying.”
“Who’s dy
ing?” Cornelia said.
“Marta. Isn’t that what you were talking about?”
“No,” Issy said.
“Death is Unthinging,” instructed Abraham. “Death is our greatest teacher in the path to letting go. It is the way. Aren’t you very cold out here?”
“I’m not,” said Issy. But the wind howled.
91
The first person I see at First Community Village is Sheriff Sal. He’s planted just inside the sliding glass doors, his once-broad frame now a stack of bones in the sling of a wheelchair. The doors seal us into the disinfected air. Panic flares. But Ben heads for the old man and offers a hearty handshake.
“You promised you’d bring your dogs,” the old man says. He’s still got the mustache. His face is wrinkled and thin.
Ben gestures to the nurse. She looks like she hasn’t smiled in decades. “You think she’d let dogs in here?”
“Who’s this pretty lady?”
Ben doesn’t skip a beat. “Old friend.”
“Well, Old Friend, we’ve got cherry pie for dessert tonight, if this fella will let you stay.”
Ben slips his hand across my back and sidles me away. The mushroom carpet springs under our steps.
“You couldn’t warn me?”
Ben grins. “The expression on your face.” His gait has loosened. “He’s harmless. Brain is Swiss cheese. He was making life miserable for the nurses until they realized he’d shut up if they wheeled him out in the morning and left him until dinner. He likes to keep track of things.”
It’s out of a heart-pumping dream, walking freely in the world. Or maybe I’m pretending I’m a version of myself, the one who didn’t let Ben leave, the one who’s come with her husband to visit his mother, and has special driving sunglasses and hits up the grocery store for margarita mix and stops at boutiques to try on hats. That’s who people see, isn’t it? The open doors we pass have hand-calligraphed signs beside them—“Mrs. Dotty Smith,” “Mr. Rusty Hoggs”—revealing solitary figures draped in thin blankets. Dotty and Rusty look up between the chirps of their machinery, and the murmur of their morning TV, to see a wife and husband stalking down their hallway, and the wife isn’t the least bit afraid.
A young orderly approaches, pushing a metal box that spews tubes and buttons. She’s younger than Jenny, blond and pink-lipped, her breasts pressed tightly against her blue scrubs. “Morning.”
Ben offers only a raised hand. I find myself pleased at this loyalty to Jenny. “Friend of my daughter,” he says, “from cheerleading.” She takes another glance as we turn onto a new hallway, but he doesn’t notice. How can Anna be old enough to be friends with a nurse? In my mind, she’s been four ever since that day Ben showed up on my doorstep.
“So, you like this place?” The sun-strewn Acer saccharum seem so far off on the other side of the sealed windows.
“Mom started wandering, okay?” he says. “I have to make a living. It was one thing when Shelley-Ann could keep an eye on her.” He moves a half step ahead.
I follow him down another hallway—longer, narrower, with even browner carpet. Windows line one side of the hall and doors the other. It’s funny to imagine Teresa and Tomas navigating this place in the middle of the night. But it means they’re more capable than they seem. A woman with cotton candy hair waves to Ben as he passes, as does a tall, skinny man in a baseball cap. He must come here often; I find that this, too, pleases me.
Almost to the end of the hall, he turns on me. “How’s Xavier’s sobriety going?”
I arrange my face. It’s not completely out of left field, the notion that Xavier found himself dependent enough on alcohol that he has decided not to drink anymore. He turned down the wine at dinner. And Cornelia apologized. Which means she knew.
My ignorance fuels him. “And Cornelia? She doing okay after losing that baby a couple years back?”
“I didn’t know about that.”
His mouth forms an ugly knot. “You’re so sure you know everyone’s business. Meanwhile, you spend your life shut up in your fancy house, pretending your shit doesn’t stink like the rest of ours.”
I open my mouth to defend myself.
“And don’t feed me some bullshit line about how we’re going to tie this mess up in a neat bow. You think Tomas isn’t going to use that gun if we waltz back up there?” Someone must have told him about the gun when I was getting dressed—my money’s on Cornelia. Disgust mars Ben’s face. “I used to think you were so smart.”
“You can insult me all you want but we still have to fix this.”
“I don’t have to do anything.”
“But you’re part of it. Just like I am. Just like Xavier and Issy and fucking Cornelia. You think I want to go back up there? This was never my plan.”
He steps close then. His face reddens. “Don’t blame this on anyone but yourself.”
“You really think I sent those letters?”
I can taste his breath. “You were the one who said we should kill her.”
92
A knock on our door. It was light outside, but barely. Rain pattered the roof. I was curled behind Issy, who was, in turn, curled behind Cornelia. We had passed out in Philip’s old bed, really just a mattress on the floor, which would never lose that smeared oil paint smell. All night long, Dog had tried to climb into bed with us, but we’d taken turns kicking him onto the floor while the wind whistled through the unseen cracks in the walls. These cabins were not built for the cold, and it wasn’t even winter yet.
Cornelia hopped out of bed to greet Nora, who shimmied past her down the hallway to stand over me. “What is wrong with you people? It stinks in here.”
Issy groaned, pulling her arm over her face. I sat up, landing my feet onto the frigid floor. The room bucked. The previous evening’s adventures throbbed into clarity: after Abraham left us to the news that Marta was dying—had he really said that? It seemed impossible in the light of day—Nora had discovered Ben was back, and made him go to Sarah. Then us girls had raided Butterfly’s wine cooler stash, hidden in the sandy patch below the dock. It had seemed like a good idea at the time. Now my forehead pounded, my tongue fuzzy with sugar.
“You’re supposed to go to Marta’s,” Nora said. She scratched Dog’s head.
“Says who?”
“Marta, duh.”
Nora took Dog with her to the Main Lodge. Issy and Cornelia fell back to sweet sleep. I stepped into the sludgy morning. My heavy-duty slicker kept me dry from the rain, but the damp crept in anyway. I remembered to stop and listen—not for Dog, or Abraham, but for you. There were still bursts of hope; you might find me again, out here in the forest. I should have brought Topsy. Maybe you were right there in that stand of birches, ready to reach out. But no, I was alone in the cold and wind, with a slippery uphill path before me. At least I could use Marta’s toilet.
Marta’s cabin was sided in red clapboard. Her delicate porch cantilevered over the hillside that, in turn, overlooked the lake—a small but decadent amenity that had not been made a priority in any of Home’s post-and-beam cabins.
She was at the door before I lifted my hand to knock. Part of me had hardened with Samuel Weaver’s slaughter, but I hadn’t realized how far I already felt from her, how quickly my transformation had come, until we were face-to-face. She ushered me in. I took off the slicker. I left the hatchet at the door. The rain-lashed world dissolved. She was so real up close: the white hair she cut herself, her worn fingernails, the smoky scent of her skin.
Unlike the Home cabins, Marta’s was on the grid, with a tidy electric stove whose coils burned orange, and low, warm baseboards. This was a home built to survive the Maine winters—double-paned windows, well-insulated walls, and a soapstone stove that burned the wood twice. A closet in the far corner held a ceramic toilet, a welcome counterpoint to the latrines. My piss reeked of decayed alcohol; I put my head in my hands.
The main room was friendly with the smell of popcorn. Bookcases glowed with firelight as a Mozart pia
no concerto burst, tinny, from the radio. Marta whisked simmering milk on the stovetop and shook another pot to melt butter. Her clock said seven. She set out the food on the coffee table and ladled steaming hot chocolate into two hand-thrown mugs, brown as the earth. She settled into a maroon armchair, just her size.
I thought I didn’t care for popcorn, but ten minutes on, I’d already finished it. She knew I never ate that way unless I was with her. She reached across the table. Her hand was thinner than I remembered. I let it stay out there, alone. “If you, or any of the others, are scared, or uncomfortable with what’s going on, you should tell me. You must tell me.”
She was dying; that’s what Abraham had said. She was friends with the sheriff.
“Believe me, I know how convincing Abraham can be. But no one is planning an attack. No one is lurking in the woods. And despite what he’s telling you about cops, the sheriff is a good man, Saskia. It makes sense that you would be afraid of law enforcement. I’m so sorry about what happened to your brother. But you can’t follow Abraham down his paranoid rabbit hole. The world out there is just the world.”
Marta was the one who’d as good as said that poor little Sammy Weaver had deserved what he’d gotten. She had nearly tricked me, like a witch in a fairy tale, lulling me with a warm room and good food, when for all I knew, the FBI was listening in right now, guns at the ready.
“No one’s out to get us,” she said.
“There is no us.” I took up the hatchet. “There’s you, and then there’s Home.”
Tearing into the woods, through the morning storm, I thought of what I’d discovered in the bathroom: a pile of tissues in Marta’s waste bin, splashed in shades of scarlet and rust. Too many of them to count. Blood, from somewhere inside Marta’s body. Blood that wanted to get out.
93
On the bed in Sarah’s room lies a pile of hospital blankets. Then I notice a bit of gnarled flesh beside that pile, like a sparrow stunned by a window. My brain finally locates a word for it: hand.
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