I’m so grateful for the darkness.
“I came to New York,” he continues, “because I thought maybe I could, though. Be free. Did you ever trick yourself into thinking you could? Just for a little while? Maybe, I thought, maybe it will be easier than I thought, just drive away from the life I’ve made and find Saskia”—his voice quavers—“and we could make our own kind of happiness.”
I’d offered him breakfast. He’d asked if he could use the phone. I watched the curve of his back when she answered. How it closed itself against me the longer they talked. When he got off, he told me Anna had a fever. But I’d known he was going to leave, the moment he asked to use the phone.
He clears his throat. “It wouldn’t have lasted. You know that, right? Even if I’d stayed.”
Headlights pierce us from behind, coming up Bushrow Road. It’s impossible to see who’s approaching. Ben curses and ducks. The vehicle slows. It curves toward us from the center of the road, then pulls up behind us. In the moment before it cuts its lights, even I feel afraid. I have not believed in ghosts—you are not a ghost, my darling—but now, in the midnight smudge, we find each other’s hand. Ben’s palm is slick. We wait until the lights cut. The vehicle behind us is big, bulking, black.
Issy is out of the front seat first. She lifts a hand over her eyes and bends down to glance in our rear window. Relief floods my body, followed quickly by the impulse to jump out and terrify her. But she would make too much noise. Ben pulls away. “I thought you weren’t fucking coming,” I whisper through my newly opened door.
They are all out of the car by then. They crunch across the gravel. Issy explains that Sekou is back at the house with Jenny. Cornelia declares that it was smart of us to park out here. Now there are four of them to manage, when I had it down to only one. But, no, it is best to get this over with, to finally answer our call.
Ben closes his glove compartment, and puts whatever heavy thing he has removed from it, wrapped in a dish towel, into the inside pocket of his jacket.
108
It was so cold, our eyeballs hurt. It was so cold, the air crackled in our lungs.
“Tomas was lucky,” Sheriff Sal said, addressing those of us gathered in front of the Main Lodge. “Relatively clean tear, as these things go. The doctors in Portland say he’ll make a full recovery.” Sarah covered her hands with her mouth and turned away to cry.
The sheriff leaned down to Nora, wedged behind Issy. “He got to ride in a helicopter,” he said. She eyed him but she didn’t flip him off. “I need you to tell me what happened,” the sheriff said. He was looking at her, but he was talking to all of us. “No one’s in trouble. But we do want to prevent future attacks.”
Abraham held his arms wide. “You see any other dogs here, Sheriff?” The sheriff chuckled as if they were in on the same terrific joke. Over Abraham’s shoulder, beside the parked cruiser, Ephraim crossed his arms and glowered. A gust hit; there was no way to know when another whip of snow was coming down from the sky or churning up from the ground. Abraham led the sheriff into his cabin. We scurried into the Main Lodge.
Sarah gave us carrots to chop. Ben was so close I could feel the heat coming off him. I was happy to have an excuse to be close to him, until I remembered the reason; then I felt shocked all over by sadness. Nora wept into her mother’s shoulder. Cornelia cried, too, and Issy drew her knees up to her chin. Xavier looked at the floor. Surely they were all sad for Tomas. In theory, I was sad for Tomas—his pain, his fear—and for Teresa, too. But what I felt—what I actually felt, as a drenching weight inside my chest—was the loss of that velvet spot behind Dog’s ears, and of the haphazard wetness of his licks on the back of my hand, and his warm weight on my feet in the middle of the night. We pressed around the table together, waiting for the young officer, hand resting on his holster, to call our names.
Later, in the dim light of Abraham’s cabin, Sal was friendly but serious. Diplomacy, I thought, a word I didn’t even know I knew.
“Tell him the truth,” said Abraham, hands spread wide. I knew he meant it how Grandmother meant it. So I told of loving Dog and how Tomas did, too, and of the moose jerky Tomas had been carrying around, and how kids can be, how they can tease a dog with something delicious and then take it back, how they can wallop a dog and the dog doesn’t know any better but to do what it was born to do, and how terrible we felt for what happened to poor Tomas, and how brave Marta was, how smart, to do exactly what was right when the situation required.
I had gotten Topsy. I held him like you held him. I wept. I wept for the slice of the hatchet into Dog’s head. When I imagined Tomas in a white room in the hospital in Portland surrounded by beeping machines, inside me began a crawling horror—but the sheriff didn’t need to know that. He saw me crying, with a bunny in my arms. A girl, crying, poor little thing.
The policemen left. Abraham stood in the middle of the driveway, one hand up in a fixed wave, until they were off the land. Then he turned back toward us. It seemed he would say something that might end our sorrow. But instead he walked past us. Everyone listened to the cold slip of the bolt into its lock.
109
It is the closest to dark this part of the world can be, no moon, no clouds; only the speckle of the Milky Way. But my eyes don’t need to work out here. It’s mostly my ears and memory leading us along the edge of the gravel road that skirts the top of Home. I’m not practiced in overshooting the driveway and taking the other way in. It would be helpful to use a flashlight, but the threat of Tomas’s gun makes that unwise.
I listen for the stream. I remember the boulder under my hand. The two steps built from stones, just down from where she used to park her Rabbit. I remember. I remember. I find our way onto Marta’s land.
110
Issy and Cornelia and Xavier and Ben and I played Spit before the meager fire, rotating front to back to soak in the heat before our icy beds. The hatchet, newly cleaned, sharpened, and returned to me by Amos, glimmered in the firelight. He’d made me a belt out of rope, with the ends burned so they didn’t fray, and a deerskin holster. I hadn’t wanted to touch the hatchet, but he’d pressed it into my hand and said, “It’s a tool, girl. Just a tool.” No trace of blood. But it wasn’t only the hatchet that brought back that day: every conversation, every thought, every sound seemed to return that moment to me, and the moments before it, when Dog’s nails would tick across the floorboards for a scratch behind the ears.
“How long do you think Tomas and Teresa will be gone?” I asked.
“Don’t they have to build him a new face?”
“Issy!” Cornelia said.
Issy didn’t look up from tossing her cards. Grief had made her flippant. “I’m just saying, I bet that takes a while.”
“He’s going to be okay,” Xavier said. He looked up at Cornelia, missing the chance to slap the smaller pile. “That’s what Teresa said in her letter, right? There’s nothing wrong with his brain. He’ll have a little scar but he’s okay.”
“He’s not okay.” Tears spilled over Cornelia’s cheeks. “He’s never going to be okay.”
In the corner, Ben’s face washed with pity.
“It wasn’t Dog’s fault,” I said.
“We should have trained him.” Xavier put his hand on Cornelia’s back.
After a moment, Ben said, “I overheard something. Something my dad told my mom.”
Issy slapped the smaller pile. “Well…?” She gathered up her cards to shuffle them. Xavier let his lie.
Ben cleared his throat. “I wasn’t down there, at the water, when Dog attacked Tomas. None of you were, right?”
“We’ve been over this,” Issy said. “A million times.” Xavier gestured for her to shut up. She set down her cards with a dramatic sigh. A mouse scuttled along the hallway, a dart of movement into the shadows.
“Butterfly and Abraham were down there, with Dog, before Tomas came by. My dad saw them from the roof where he was working. Dog was with them, sniffing around.”
> “Being a dog,” Cornelia said.
“Then, after the attack, Butterfly took my dad aside and told him that Abraham was … he was kind of, like, teasing Dog. Being rough with him. Dog snapped a couple of times and then she saw the kids coming down the hill and told him to calm Dog down, told him to, like, put him on his rope or whatever. But Abraham wouldn’t.”
“So?” said Issy.
“So then Tomas asks if anyone’s seen his mom. And Dog is still all riled up. Tomas is just being, you know, a kid, but Dog goes for him. Lunges.”
“Exactly,” said Issy, ready with a card. But Xavier’s attention was on Ben, who had leaned forward, into the story, his face now lit up in the firelight. I couldn’t look away either.
Ben’s voice was low and careful: “Butterfly said that when the Dog had Tomas, you know, by the face, before everyone came running, before anyone tried pull Dog off, Abraham … laughed.”
Issy shuffled and bridged the cards. “I know she’s your mother,” she said to Cornelia, “but I would not trust how Butterfly tells any story about Abraham.”
Ben ignored her. We all did. “That night at the bonfire, Butterfly took my dad aside. She told him the story, I guess, and he said, ‘Well, what do you want me to do about it?’ and she said something like how Abraham seems one way to all of us, but he’s not really that way, not deep down. She said, he’s, like, playing a game. She said she chose my dad to tell because he’s the only one who could take Abraham on if things got physical.” Ben fidgeted with the toe of his mended wool sock. “So then my dad told my mom about it, in the middle of the night. They thought I was sleeping. She said she didn’t ever want to hear him talk like that again. My mom, you know, she doesn’t usually yell at him. I mean, she wasn’t yelling, it was the middle of the night, but there was something in her voice, like—she was more than scared. It was like she knew he was right, that Butterfly was right, but no one else could ever know.”
Ben flashed a doubting smile. “It doesn’t sound like Abraham, though, right? Laughing while Tomas got attacked? And I mean, we all told the sheriff that Tomas was, I don’t know, taunting Dog, and I just don’t feel right if—”
“You want your mom to be safe?” We all looked back at Issy then, because of the sharpness in her voice. “Ben, look at me. The Unthinged World is the only place your mother’s safe.”
Ben turned his face toward the window.
Xavier caught my eye. He frowned. We had no idea what Issy was talking about.
“Your mom did the right thing, telling your dad to shut up. He shouldn’t talk about it. None of us should.” Issy met each of our eyes, then, one by one. “Okay? No one talks about this anymore.” She picked up Xavier’s cards and shuffled them, and made him keep playing.
111
The dark of the forest seems impenetrable, but we must go in. It’s impossible to read the trees in front of us—even the birches, which should be glowing white. Within a minute, each of us is injured—from a cheek, an arm, a toe.
What’s worse is how quickly we fall apart. Marta’s trail is difficult to find. I know it’s there, but they whisper behind me, far too loud, full of doubt. If I were Tomas, I’d have shot us already. I shush them like children. Perhaps I mention the gun. Anyway, they hush.
There’s no helping it, we need a flashlight. Cornelia brings out her phone. It buzzes as she unzips it from her purse, the screen lit up. We hiss at her to turn it off. It lights her in a bluish glow. Longing flushes her face. One of the daughters, calling mommy from the belly of a beautifully appointed family room. Homework help, boy troubles.
Xavier reaches for the phone. She refuses to hand it over. There’s a tussle in the dark, a tug-of-war that’s ridiculous and louder than ever, despite their whispers, because of them. The phone goes sailing. Xavier pulls out his own phone, then there’s a grapple in the dark for Cornelia’s, whose greatest concern, it seems, is whether the screen is broken. It is not. She is so happy about this that I must physically restrain myself from kicking her.
The light from Xavier’s phone is reddish as he beams it through his T-shirt. He crouches low, waves the light back and forth until he finds the path. As I suspected, it is not overgrown, which means that I am onto something.
112
“Take that thing out of here.” Sarah pointed to the hatchet at my hip. Nora cracked a smile for the first time in days—she loved it when anyone who wasn’t her got in trouble—but by the time I came back inside, she was kneading the dough, solemn once again. I kept thinking Dog would be in every room I entered, that I had just missed him. The hatchet bobbed on its branch in the whipping wind. We worked in a veil of yeast, until darkness turned to morning. The room filled with the heat of pumpkin muffins.
“Haven’t been seeing much of Marta, have you?” Sarah asked.
The plump dough sprang beneath my fingertips. “There’s nothing to forage in the winter.” I missed Dog in my bones, but I knew it was wrong to blame Marta. If you had to choose between a dog or a child, the dog was the one who should die. I kept thinking of the moment she’d appeared before me and held out her hand. How she knew what to do and had not been afraid to do it. I also kept thinking about how I would never feel Dog’s hot breath at my ear, first thing in the morning, ever again.
“That bread’s rubber now,” Sarah said, her chin gesturing toward my overworked dough.
“Sorry.”
The door to the Main Lodge squealed open, as the first arrivals of the morning stomped off the snow and ice against the fireplace. I’d assumed the muffins were one of Sarah’s morning surprises, but she pressed the basket into my hands.
“Take Marta some breakfast,” she said.
The wind knifed through my wool mittens as I made my way down the main Home path. My eyes watered in the sun reflected off the lake. In front of one of the fishing huts, a man looked my way. I wondered if he thought us as strange as we thought him and his kind; showing up on their snowmobiles before the sun rose, hanging out in their snowsuits all day, drinking beer on the ice until the world got dark again.
I could find the cold beautiful when I let it swallow me. Ice had formed at the tips of the branches, setting the air tinkling. Before, I would have taken that dulcet sound as a sign of you. Was it that Home was enough now, and I didn’t need you to be there to make it enough? Just thinking that felt like a betrayal, but where Home had, at first, seemed gilded with the possibility of you, now every brittle trunk, every brown leaf chattering in the icy wind, was enough in and of itself. I pronounced their names easily: Picea mariana, Betula cordifolia, Amelanchier laevis, Pinus strobus, Acer saccharum. Maybe their names could be enough. The hatchet banged against my thigh.
“You look like Red Riding Hood.”
Abraham was leaning against a birch that lined the path. Warmth flushed from my collarbone down across my chest. He held out his hand. He took the basket. He said, “I suppose this makes me the Big Bad Wolf, and here we are, on our way to Grandmother’s house.” I Unthinged myself of all my burdensome thoughts. Unthing yourself, Unthing yourself, Unthing yourself. How good it felt to simply follow.
We climbed to Marta’s house. Icicles hung from the gutters. I looked at Abraham looking at the tidy building. In the clench of his jaw I saw that he blamed her for something worse than the slaughter of Dog. He took my basket, Sarah’s basket, to the door. He should have knocked. But he went right in. So did I, I suppose.
The flush of the hearth was a gift, the smell of coffee a surprise from the Thinged World. But then I got a glance at Abraham, who suddenly looked afraid. I turned to see.
There, on Marta’s couch, lay two people, one on top of the other: Marta and the sheriff, naked as the day. Him below, her above, breasts lying against the gray smattering of his chest hair as a Mozart piano concerto tinkled away. Their clothes were spread across the floor. A kiss passed between them. Her eyes were closed. A moan. They did not know we were there, not yet.
113
I let myself be
lieve we are quiet as we pad down Marta’s trail. Sure enough, her cabin appears. A yellow glow spills from its windows, which seems almost an obscenity against the black night. We stop to regroup. It will truly be just as Sarah said: we will walk up and look in the window.
There are voices in the cabin. I let myself feel it then, how close we are. On the other side of that wall waits the answer.
Then comes the click of the safety. We wheel around. Tomas’s scar is lit up in the scant light. Cornelia’s hands clasp her mouth. Ben reaches into his jacket pocket, for whatever he placed there from his van.
“Abraham!” I shout.
The voice inside Marta’s cabin switches off. A radio. We turn to look that way, even Tomas. A figure inside makes its way toward us, its shadow harried and jerky and hard to decipher. It could be a stranger, or Teresa. It could be the dead, back to claim us.
The shadow makes way for the body it belongs to. Step, step, step toward the dark. Toward us. The body is thin, far thinner than it should be. But it’s tall, and as it places its hands against the window, a bit of light catches its eyes.
He watches as he always did, hardly blinking.
114
“With him? With him?” Abraham’s voice was raw and high and unfamiliar.
Marta and Sal lifted their heads. A startled cry, but I couldn’t tell who made it. Marta pulled off of Sal’s lap. His penis bobbed, purple, in a way that made me feel sorry for it. He tossed Marta the afghan. I backed into the cold while she was still a slip of flesh. I leapt off the porch and ran until the stripped trees swallowed me. The men’s voices rose behind me over the ice-crusted snow. I was already back to the land, past the ice, past our cabin—where a slice of Ben’s face caught me out the window—pressing up the hill, sweat dripping down my spine and pooling into my long johns, hatchet thudding my leg, fingers frozen—where were my mittens?—up up up and up and up, panting now, legs burning from running through the snow, to the Main Lodge, with a chimney trail pluming into the sky. Inside I met a wall of warm air, and Sarah, and the bread, and the chopping, and the onion salt cabbage curry lentil rice aroma that could be my armor.
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