If I looked hard enough, I could see it behind our bushy windbreak, Metis’s machine rusting over. Sometimes I considered dismantling it, but I never could bring myself to follow through. All those companions who were burned or barged—I didn’t know how many, didn’t want to think about that, but I did anyway. I thought about it all the time.
I heard barking, a dog, couldn’t be Pit Bull, and went to the stoop, saw his ears perk at another bark, another, until I spotted it, the wild-eyed dog coming up our drive, stopping short when it saw us, barking madly.
Followed by a man—no, younger than that, a teenager with hair in a messy ponytail. Scrawny. I knew by his walk, sort of off-balance, that it was Andy. I took a deep breath, blew it out, leaning down to whisper to Pit Bull, “It’s him.”
Andy clapped his hands loudly and the dog quieted. It circled back, trailing as Andy approached.
Pit Bull got to his feet, unsteady as he started down the steps on his own. Worried he wouldn’t make it, I scooped him up and carried him to the bottom. His gait was a little uneasy, but he was halfway to Andy when the other dog growled.
“Stop that,” Andy said, and both dogs froze at the sound of his reprimand. Andy and I, we stood apart on the drive, closer than we’d been in years. He was earning his adult face, thinner, his nose more pronounced, though he was still smaller than me by a good half foot.
“A fire,” he said, “my trailer’s gone. Lilac. All my backups, every shred of data.”
He buried his head in my chest and I was enveloped in his ripe cloud, but that didn’t stop me from holding him, from telling him, “You’re home,” even if it was a last resort, his coming here.
The dogs circled and sniffed each other’s butts until Pit Bull lost interest and approached Andy with small, tentative steps, head down.
“What’s her name?” I asked Andy of the other one.
“Pit Bull,” he said, and I didn’t mean to laugh, but I was laughing, Andy too. He put his hands out and they both came to him, forgetting to be afraid.
GABE
EUREKA, CALIFORNIA
She should’ve known I’d come for her. Dropping Agatha Christie, a title even. Maybe she wanted me to find her? But I’ve been here, waiting in this window, watching the bookstore for nearly a week, the only one within 150 miles that has After the Funeral in stock. She could be farther north still, I could be wrong, these days in this B and B overlooking the Eureka town square a waste of time and credit.
We hadn’t been in Willits long, Nat and me, maybe a few weeks, before the fight, before I stole off with Nat’s van. He’s been angry-pinging me ever since, certain I’m never coming back. I don’t tell him otherwise, don’t tell him why I left—he kind of deserves it. He will deserve it for years, maybe forever, for leaving me. Doesn’t matter that he returned. I will never get over it, even if I want to, which I don’t. At least, not right now. Not since he told me where he went without me—Tierra del Fuego. I will never forgive him.
When he first proposed the idea, it seemed crazy, leaving behind my stable life in San Francisco—the card shop that was doing better than expected, my rent-controlled Excelsior apartment, the yoga class where I pretended I could have friends—to move to the outer stretches of a nowhere kind of town. “With charm,” Nat said, really selling the place. “It has an old-timey train and an annual rodeo. Hell, it’s the resting place of Seabiscuit, that long-dead magical beast.” Not that he needed to sell it; I had loved Willits instantly. We’d come in at night, the neon sign that bridged the main road glowing GATEWAY TO THE REDWOODS in red.
The alpacas heard our approach, arcing and bobbing out of the barn. Alpacas! I don’t know what Nat was thinking.
They were curious, scared, a pair of them crossing necks in a fight, twined and turning. They broke, circled back, and ignored one another, watching us.
Nat chose the town for its location, tucked into the foothills of the coastal range, some thirty miles from the sea. Better for the alpacas, he told me, which was a lie. He knew I’d prefer to see the toss and swell and sun glare of the ocean from my bedroom window. But there’s the future to think of, and the coastlines, the maps, the whole shape of the world is changing. Who knows? Maybe Willits will overlook the Pacific Ocean someday.
Not that it’s been easy. Nat’s lousy at asking me for things, admitting he needs me. We fought about it the night before I took off. I’d heard the crazed crying coming from the barn, one of the little black-and-whites with a bad case of mange, her face lesions bleeding and acting up, and I’d found Nat in the teeny slanted barn, and he knows how I love the babies! That I want to help. “I’m not going to just sleep while you do all the work,” I told him.
“No sense in us both being tired.”
I nestled the gray-and-white neck of one of the females. “I’m not a kid anymore. Thirty—I’ll be thirty soon!”
He couldn’t keep from smiling. “I can still remember you at nine, filthy and scowling and—”
“Stop it! I don’t want to talk about that!” He’s always trying to reminisce, but I’ve worked hard to let the past go. It doesn’t help discovering he went without me. I want to ask him: Did you visit Tenochtitlán? But I’m afraid of the answer, of what it’ll do to me. We feel further away than we’ve ever been from getting there.
He went back to the barn and I went back to our room to have a good cry. I’d been crying on and off all day. It wasn’t the baby alpaca or Nat even. It was Lilac, what I’d done. It was seeing Cam on the screen so huge and pregnant.
I’d tracked her down, living in San Diego with a wife, about to have a baby. So swollen, her face was nearly unrecognizable with pregnancy bloat.
“Water retention.” She shrugged. “It just sort of came on here at the end.”
Her due date had passed, the span of her impressive, her skin dewy with sweat.
I had to tell Cam how I found Lilac. I had to tell her what I did, dousing Andy’s trailer in gasoline while he was on shift at the diner, dropping that match. I’d stayed long enough to know the trailer was gone, everything inside it, Lilac, the backups, every last trace of her, that Pit Bull going apeshit on its chain.
Cam worried her chin with her fingers. “That must have been hard,” she said.
“Yes,” I said, which was a mistake. Admitting it sliced me right open, and Nat was hovering, and I wanted to scream at him to go away. When I cry, I want to be alone—he of all people should know that. Instead he hovers, asleep in the bedside chair when I wake, as if he’s been watching me, and I want to screech: Is this love?
He’d splurged on a new mattress, told me he wanted me to have the best—the Sleep Whisperer. He’s told me the whole story so many times I’ve put it to memory. Doesn’t matter that I was there when he made the screen purchase, standing behind him, watching her, the company’s screen service rep, knowing what she was—how could he not see it?
He’d liked her, is why. He was practically in love when she told him she was located in Louisiana.
“No kidding,” he’d said into her smiling, tanned face, her hair a blond mushroom that bobbed agreeably. He told her about his bike ride to Mobile, miles along the flood-prone coastline with its abandoned storefronts and sunken roads and all that washed-up junk. I know how much he likes to talk about that—what he’s seen, how far he’s come. I don’t blame him for being proud. I blame him for being stupid.
The screen rep smiled and nodded like she was really listening. Only, when he was done and I could tell he was waiting for her to share, she said, “So what do you think? Are you ready to pull the trigger on the best sleepware in town?”
“Sleepware?” Nat repeated, and I saw the knowing hit him. AI. So embarrassed, he blurted out, “I’ll take it,” just to escape. Now I have to worry for him too, can’t get her out of my head, the human visage who’d smiled back at him, who’d seen all the way through to his foolish human heart.
* * *
That morning, the morning I took off in the van, Nat w
as crashed out hard, and I laced up my boots and headed out to greet the alpacas: Georgette and Luna and Leonarda and the others. The little one with mange. I cupped her sored face, told her it’d get better even though I don’t really know if it will.
I gave them all girl names. Nat said it’s weird. Said I’m weird. “Whatever,” I said, and he laughed, gruff and not full-on, holding something back—who knows what.
Nuzzling the alpacas, I told them I’d be back, curled under the fence, and hustled off.
I wound my way between the clusters of eucalyptus, taking over, the trees all invasive, their trunks tangled in poison oak and blackberry bramble, hard to tell the two apart—to know what to treat like treasure, what to avoid. There was something like a trail beaten into the ground and I took it a good half mile up a steep incline, through a fennel forest, until I found the spot I’d scouted for our weekly screen. I worried that this time she wouldn’t answer. I worried that way every time. I called her up, connected, smiling into my phone, into the black where she should be.
“Are you there?” I asked.
“Mmm,” she said.
I showed her my view, giving her panoramic, the whole shape of the place, landing on the waterfall last. Nat didn’t even realize it was there when he bought the property. But I slunk off on my own. Never even told him. I found it casting off the rocks above, casting into the rocks below.
“It’s ours,” I said, “yours. I named it for you. Kit Falls.”
“Mmm,” she said.
It had taken me the better part of a year to forgive her for not telling me about the doctor, what she’d known—about the viruses that took Mam and Bee. But I never confused the two—the doctor and Kit. They weren’t the same—I’d sensed it the first time I’d spoken to Kit on the screen, how much she loved me, how she would do anything to protect me. It wasn’t the same with the doctor. To her, I was helpful, I had a purpose, I could produce results. When I recognized that I needed Kit, that she needed me too, I’d screened her, and she’d been there. She’s always there.
I wanted her to come, but I didn’t say it—I knew she wouldn’t. What she said about later, about being together, had been a lie or poor extrapolation, the future not what she’d envisioned when she’d said that to me. I don’t know what she’d pictured, a shift in the marketplace, a second chance, but it hasn’t come. People haven’t yet forgotten what happened, but someday they will—they always do. I worry about the meantime, her body, about her being found.
“How’re you holding up?” I asked.
“I’m fine, Gabe. Everything’s fine.”
She wouldn’t even let me see her view—she never does—our communication one-sided, her view a black square on my phone, her location a secret. I do guesswork, asking questions nonchalantly like, Is it raining there too? So later I can look up the weather patterns, whittle away at possibilities. Mmm, she usually responds, somewhere between no and yes, and I am losing my patience. Sometimes I just blurt it out, Where are you? And she says, I’m safe. I’m sound. You don’t have to worry.
I always record our conversations so I can come home and amplify, listen as if leaning in, but all I’ve ever heard is the white gentle roar of nothing, almost as if she’s found a way to wash it out, the sound of wherever she is.
I asked her again, “Where are you?”
“Currently? I’ve planted roots near a creek. I’m watching the bunnies, the birds. One perched on my nose. If I stay still long enough, they think I’m a tree.”
“How long?”
“Not sure. A few hours?”
Liar. Time—it’s all mapped out for her. To lie is harder.
“The ducks have come,” Kit said, “a female and twenty-nine babies. They can’t all be hers.”
“Maybe she stole them,” I said, because better that than the alternative, abandoned babies, murdered mothers, any grim truth I could imagine into being, and damn it, there she was, Mam, always there.
“Mmm,” Kit said.
I pictured her cabin in the woods. I pictured her filling time with walks—she always liked to take walks. I pictured her on a porch with a book—she prefers real, likes turning the pages, the feel of them under finger.
“What’re you reading?” I asked her.
“I’ve been on an Agatha Christie kick lately. The previous tenant left a near-intact collection, and Diana never bothered with fiction.”
I heard her say near-intact, sat down on a boulder, the waterfall misting my back. “What’s it about? The one you’re reading now.”
“A woman is sentenced to life in prison for poisoning her husband.”
“Ugh, he probably deserved it.”
“Sixteen years later her daughter gets Poirot—that’s Christie’s famous Belgian detective—to investigate for fear of her fiancé leaving.”
“Right. I’ll die if you leave me!”
“Poirot learns that five other people were in the home on the day of the murder, dubbing them the five little pigs.”
“Cute. So which piggy did it?”
“Definitely the roast beef,” she said, and it hit me like a surprise, her humor, a flicker of her face, the burnt taste of her lasagna. “I’m reading them all in a row, the Poirot books. That is, if I can get my hands on After the Funeral.”
“I miss you,” I said.
“I miss you too,” she said from the black. “Are you getting on okay with Nat?”
“Fine,” I lied, too tired to rehash our fight, not sure I was even mad anymore. When he’d showed up at my place in the Excelsior, eleven years gone, I recognized him immediately, throwing my arms around his neck. He smelled of sweat, and I nearly collapsed with the sense memory. Home, home, I was home, and I could tell he felt it too, not letting me go.
It was nice, that first feeling. I feel it still, between the waves of anger, which I ride with true purpose, to remind him what he’s done. It’s hard to let go of that kind of pain. Sometimes I want to. Other times I hold tightly to it, I grind it between my teeth, I waggle it in front of his face, forcing him to look.
The waterfall was getting annoying, its relentless sound, the haze that had soaked my back. I stood and shook it off.
“Same time next week?” Kit said.
“Same time,” I repeated in a fake upbeat voice.
Something I will never tell Nat: the real reason I was so eager to move to Willits is that I know Kit is up here somewhere, all of northern California sprawling out with its tiny coves and hidden caves and forests that stretch for miles. Though her plan could have changed—she could be in some closet in Crescent City, for all I know—but it felt right moving north, closer to where Cam and Lilac met, not far from where Nat and I grifted all those years ago.
* * *
I slip on my sneakers and head downstairs, my overeager host calling from the B and B’s kitchen, “Breakfast?”
“No thanks,” I say as I step outside into the damp coastal fog of Eureka, crossing the square where a dog sprints circles at full speed.
The door of the bookstore opens with a ding and the cashier welcomes me by name. “Hi Fred,” I say, and we share a smile. It’s funny how quickly you can become friends with a stranger, how quickly you can forget them too.
I go to the Mysteries/Thrillers section again. I’ve visited it every day this week, watching from the B and B’s window when I can’t hold the book in my hands. I don’t catch it upon my first pass. Gone, I panic, come and gone. But no. On my second pass, it’s still there. After the Funeral. I pull it off the shelf, flipping to the beginning: Old Lanscombe moved totteringly from room to room, pulling up the blinds. Now and then he peered with screwed-up rheumy eyes through the windows.
“Got a call earlier,” Fred says from behind me. He’s shorter when he’s not perched on his stool at the register, barely reaching my shoulders. He stuffs his hands into the pockets of his denim apron. “About that book you’re always visiting.”
I want to scream. “Oh?” I say.
�
�Sorry,” he says, “I kinda promised it to her.”
“Oh,” I say again.
“She’ll be by this afternoon.”
I read the second paragraph: Soon they would be coming back from the funeral. He shuffled along a little faster. There were so many windows.
“It’s okay,” I say, handing the book to him. “I’m glad.”
I grab a coffee and find a bench on the square, watch a woman hula-hooping for exercise. Nat will be angry when I find Kit and bring her home. Dangerous, the risk—I can hear him lecturing me. Both of us are stuck on repeat, saying what doesn’t need saying, remembering things that should be forgotten. Doesn’t matter. I won’t be bullied into changing my mind. Here with me—that’s where she belongs. In this place I’ve claimed for us.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I owe immense gratitude to the exceptional women who shepherded this project, my agent Stephanie Delman and editor Alison Callahan. To my most steadfast readers, Katherine Lieban and Heather McDonald. To all of the wonderful people at Sanford J. Greenburger Associates and Scout Press who helped to push this book into the world, especially Brita Lundberg, Stefanie Diaz, Joal Hetherington, Jaime Putorti, Meagan Harris, Anabel Jimenez, Carolyn Reidy, Jon Karp, Jen Bergstrom, Aimee Bell, Jen Long, Eliza Hanson, Sally Marvin, Lisa Litwack, Caroline Pallotta, Allison Green, John Paul Jones, and Kaitlyn Snowden. To early readers, Jen Larsen and Molly Ann Magestro. To Kaitlyn Andrews-Rice and Split Lip Magazine for giving me a wonderful community. To the editors of the Indiana Review for publishing the first chapter and treating my work with tremendous care, particularly Tessa Yang, Maggie Sue, Essence London, and Hannah Thompson. To the Writers Grotto and the Steinbeck Center for their support. To my parents Kathy and Terry Flynn for their endless everything. To my dear friend Laura Watts for her constant camaraderie. To Thea and Ren James for bringing such joy and inspiration into my everyday. And most of all, to my beautiful, complicated California, with its secret coves and endless forests that I’ll never stop exploring.
The Companions Page 21