A beautiful girl: freckled, angled. Boyd’s center of gravity seemed lower than other people’s; her balance came from the base of her spine. Her posture seemed crouched, primed, as if at any minute she could unspool herself and be more than she appeared. A latent possibility there. Yet so young. Still so hung up on pleasing.
Carla breathed in the smoke, tingeing her insides with sage, infusing this modern house with ancient things that had almost been forgotten. What would it hurt, she thought, if she truly awakened the serpent?
She was crazy. She knew it. But she also knew she was no more crazy than the fundamentalists upriver, who had also come to the Hill Country for refuge. The women who were not allowed to wear pants, the homeschooled children who never went anywhere but church. She saw them in the Walmart on 281; she recognized the similarity between them but doubted that they did the same. They looked at her with suspicion, as a bearer of iniquity, but she looked at them as kindred spirits.
If she had an apple, she would eat it, though historians suggested that it had been a pomegranate in the Garden of Eden. They—she and the fundamentalists—believed in the same things, only she believed in those things and more, and in those things in a different way. Multiplicity, she told herself. The possibility of the infinite.
She was meant to see the snakes headed to the water. She was meant to know that something had changed or was changing. That the earth was in charge again.
She rose, curious to see where the snakes had gone and what other wonders there were to behold. How she wished that Lucy Maud were at home, but Boyd had indicated that she was not. In Carla’s dark house, she was lonely, her eyes hooded in the dim, her body calcifying cross-legged.
Her knees and ankles cracked as she unfolded herself. She did not yet know why she felt this sense that the world was ending, or why the snakes had stirred in her such a sense of calamity. There was the lack of electricity and Boyd’s worry about her friend, but none of that added up to the dread Carla felt, the certainty that something had gone quite seriously wrong. In nearly every religion is a sense that balance must be restored by a sacrifice.
She opened the door, letting the smoke inside the house dissipate. Outside, the sky was yellow, and the rain still dripped heavily from the eaves. Her feet were immediately soaked, but she kept walking, her face to the wind. She walked up her driveway and out onto the road, then she walked toward the dam, toward Lucy Maud’s house. She spread her arms, palms up, and she lifted her face. A ghost whiff of sage clung to her. She saw no sign of life, and certainly not the snakes she was seeking: the animals had all fled.
But Boyd had not, she saw. When she approached Lucy Maud’s house, she saw her own truck, the one Boyd had borrowed to go get her friend. For a second, she forgot the snakes. She turned toward Lucy Maud’s house, curious to see how Boyd had helped her friend and returned so quickly. She thought about how, in the old days, if they were going to sacrifice something to restore a balance, it would be someone or something like Boyd: young, good, someone whose loss would be felt. In that regard, Carla was in no danger.
Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here
We Are Entering the Sixth Great Extinction
It is hard not to paint this world in elegy. We have melted the poles and raised the seas, and we are the last who will see what we have seen. In our lifetimes, the ocean will be equal parts plastic and fish. We can expect three quarters of species to disappear over the next century. Look out your window. Imagine the loss. Who can say what is to come next? The world will not end, perhaps, but what you and I have known, what my son and his friend have known, is passing, and will not come again.
2:45 P.M.
The little boy had pulled Boyd off the trail. Lichen unfolded across the boulders they crossed, and burrs clung to the legs of her pants. A smell of wet. No trees in this spot. The sky should have been open, the world visible beyond a few yards. But Boyd could see nothing past a short stone’s throw; the world’s tone was muted.
She watched the boy in front of her, one minute walking solemnly, the next scampering up a large piece of granite. His bare feet were calloused, used to going unshod. When she’d first encountered him at what she’d thought was the foot of the dam, he’d been missing a tooth. She even thought she could remember which one: the top center one, the one to her left. Now when he grinned at her, she saw he was missing several: both front, both bottom. The gums beneath were not full and pink, either. She could see the sockets, tipped white and pale, drying. She looked at the ground, instinctively searching for the fallen teeth, but she saw nothing.
She could remember little German. As a homeschooled student, she’d studied several languages: French and Spanish in particular, but also Greek, Turkish, Latin, and, yes, some German. These last she’d studied as part of her library’s digital collection, a software program with lessons in a hundred languages. Of all of these, German had been the toughest, the least intuitive for Boyd. The cognates seemed to make little sense when placed in sentences. Now she could not remember how to say Where are you taking me? Where are we going? She could hardly remember how to say where, though she remembered that it did not sound like the English where. “Wo?” she tried.
The boy stopped, his hands placed flatly against a boulder he was about to scale. He pointed vaguely up and forward. “Das Fluss.”
“Sie,” she said. You. “Mutter? Vater? Nein?” Where was his family?
He shook his head. In his eyes, the iris seemed to be overtaking the white. His skin had a flat affect. Gray. “Sie sind zu Hause. Sie suchen mich.”
She caught none of it. They did not have a language between them. “You speak no English?” She saw his forearms had goose bumps, though the day was warm. “Sprechen Sie Englisch?”
“Nein.” Then he reconsidered. “I can speak a little. The river is close.” He pointed again, this time over the boulder where his hands now rested. “See. See for your own self.”
She hesitated, her weight shifting beneath her. She knew what he was, didn’t she? But she’d followed him anyway. Or maybe she’d followed him because she’d known. His low level of pain, constant but flat, out of her realm of helping. He helped her, yes, or at least he thought he did, but he also wanted something from her. She thought she knew what this was, and she knew she’d be unable to give it. The time for helping this child had passed more than a hundred years ago. Did he know?
He smiled at her, his mouth now missing even more teeth. “Oh, no,” he said, as if he could read her mind. Was he speaking English or did she now understand his German? “All time is the same now. Come. Look at the river.”
He took her by the elbow, and the place where his hand rested seared cold. She felt for a second his panic, saw the night and cold settling in around him as he stopped to wait for his parents. He was still waiting. She moved forward, put her hands on the granite, climbed.
He’d led her to the river, swollen with rain. The dam must have been far below them now: she couldn’t even see it. She saw nothing to indicate settlement or civilization, save for one faint curl of smoke to the west. She had not realized that the stretch between the dam and Horseshoe Bay was so large. Multimillion-dollar homes should have been here, boat docks, golf course greens. Instead there was a long swath of nothing: water and trees and her familiar river looking like the Mississippi, unbounded and bestial. Somewhere out there was Isaac.
She turned, a question on her lips. But the boy was gone.
She pulled her hands away from the stone and slid down, walking over to where the boy had been. No trace. She looked back the way they had come and could not see the trail. She could have sworn that there had been no trees, but now the trees had closed behind them after their passage through. She could not guess the path of return.
But there was no need to return. She called for the boy briefly, not even knowing his name, but then she turned back to the rock and started to climb. She was not sure how she could dismiss a lost child so easily, but as she reached t
he top of the boulder and dusted her hands off, she realized that it was because the child had been so emotionally flat. Nothing had been there. She had never met a person like this, not in all her eighteen years. Even when she could not feel the emotion or sense what a person thought—telling what a person thought was such a rare exception—she could tell why somebody was doing whatever he or she was doing. She could sense motivation. The world was endlessly fascinating to her because of this, and she felt it was splayed open, both obvious and profoundly unknowable. But the child had not been or done or felt like any of that. He had long since given up hope. She hadn’t reached him at all. She hadn’t even known his name. Oh, but she had, hadn’t she? Didn’t she know his name was Caleb?
Then what had he been doing here? Where had he come from and how? And the only answer she could honestly give herself was the storm. The things that she had seen in the last day—it was, only now, approaching twenty-four hours!—were things that could not have happened before. She’d had a preview when the garden had grabbed her wrists that day toward the end of the drought. And Caleb, this ghost child looking for his parents, had come to get her over the dam, up the river as quickly as possible.
She knew enough about herself and about others to know she was somehow different. But everybody was different in some way. Ruben King had the ability to nearly see the past, to see history walking. Lucy Maud was a pleaser, a server, a thin layer spread wide, giving, giving, giving, then taking it back in shrill bursts that shocked everyone around her. At war in Lucy Maud were these two things: what she imagined that others needed and what she needed herself. These two things could not coexist; they were instead like children’s hands in the game where two people stacked them, pulling the bottom one out and placing it on the top, repeating, repeating, until the game devolved into a series of furious slaps. Boyd found it revealing that nobody could play that game for longer than a few seconds, as if everybody recognized the futility. Rather than making people just stop, the futility accelerated the game. Nobody could stand to end up on the bottom. Lucy Maud’s ability to hold this self-subversion in suspension astounded Boyd.
Carla, too, could sense things others could not, but Carla’s intuition was different, earthy, like a third eye. Carla’s gift came from looking, from a natural curiosity, from an innate femaleness, a certain view of the world. Carla called the earth Mother.
But what was Isaac’s ability? Isaac had a calm matter-of-factness, a cold eye for logic. It wasn’t that he was emotionless, exactly, but more that emotions were the lesser part of his makeup. On good days, Boyd found this calculation to be a ballast to her own overprimed sensitivity. On bad days, well …
But what were the bad days with Isaac? He never lost his temper, was never unpleasant to be around. The worst that ever happened with him was an occasional low-grade irritability, as there had been two mornings ago at the campsite when he’d snapped at Lucy Maud, and he’d immediately felt bad about it. But this cold logic was not an ability, and instead more of a way of being, and Boyd found this coldness was often a relief to her, a source of support: Isaac was always Isaac.
She shimmied down the other side of the rock feetfirst on her belly, sending shards flying as the granite exfoliated beneath her fingers, the outer layer hardened and sloughing off. She was going downhill now, this boulder at the tip of a hill of them. Her toes flexed in her mother’s boots, seeking purchase, and soon she was breathing heavily. The sky, rainless and cloudy for several hours now, shimmered with the promise of more rain. In the distance, black streaks in the sky revealed that Horseshoe Bay was getting pounded. The world’s edges had become clearer, and she saw that she was coming to the end of the field of boulders, coming abruptly up to the river and to its line of trees. In between the rocks now, the ground was wet, water repelled by the saturated ground. She was on the other side of the dam, but she wasn’t quite sure how, and she still could not see it. She thought again about the lack of civilization in her immediate view, how nothing man-made seemed to be in her field of vision. But no, she thought suddenly, picking up her pace as she hopped from rock to rock. She smelled the mesquite smoke now: sweet and close. She saw, too, in the trees ahead, a clapboard house, white but streaked with rain. The smoke she smelled curled out of the chimney, and in the muddy front yard, a black dog watched her draw closer.
2:45 P.M.
Lucy Maud and Kevin had reached the washed-out bridge and had, without even bothering to call, turned around and headed back to Aunt Fern’s. After a silent moment in which both thought about the bridge but said nothing, Lucy Maud realized that the reason she didn’t call her twin sister, Lou, or their aunt Fern was because Lucy Maud didn’t want to tell them that she was with Kevin, the implication being that she’d been with Kevin for all those hours in the interim, too. Not that Lou or Aunt Fern would say anything. It was the looks they would give each other, looks saying that the weakness of the heart could be painful, that what makes a heart happy in the short term could well undermine it later. And Lucy Maud knew the pain was coming. She knew Kevin was engaged to another woman, that that other woman did not know that Lucy Maud was with her fiancé (how much did that word hurt?). No, Lucy Maud knew that this—whatever this was—was temporary and would last only until they found Boyd, who was probably still at Aunt Fern’s. Lucy Maud was not worried about Boyd. Lucy Maud had raised a resourceful, competent child. Boyd, now eighteen, could handle pretty much whatever. Boyd was fine.
But Lucy Maud was not. She was reacting to an afternoon, evening, and morning with her soon-to-be ex-husband, and she knew it was a worn and overused cliché, but she felt like an addict relapsing. She was gorging on this time with him after so long without, returning to that source of relief again and again, her left hand resting on his right thigh even now as he drove, unable to sever the connection. She pictured this hand on thigh as an IV connection, and, God, how did she feel when he stopped at a red light and absently rested his own hand on top of hers? The withdrawal would be painful. In a few hours she would be even lower than she had been before and was even now bracing herself. She could not believe that, not long ago, she had turned him away, that at times in the night when he had turned to her, she had pretended to be asleep.
But was it so wrong to believe that this separation would not come? Oh, she knew it would; she was not stupid. But was it so wrong to pretend? She tried to think of normal things she could say to him—things about dinner or taking out the trash or putting the laundry in the dryer—just normal, domestic things that would make her feel for a moment as if they still had a life together. But she could come up with nothing. If she even said, “Let’s stop by the grocery store for milk,” he would look at her and know, spell broken. She was convinced the only reason his hand had rested on hers was to comfort her because the bridge was out and they weren’t sure which side Boyd was on. He was comforting her, she thought, but she didn’t need comfort because of Boyd. Boyd was fine.
They turned off the highway and headed toward Fern’s piece of the lake. Kevin didn’t seem worried either, Lucy Maud noted. He seemed excited, and Lucy Maud analyzed this excitement: Perhaps she had let their lives become too boring. Perhaps all she had needed to do to keep her husband was to be more lively, more adventurous. Nobody wanted to live the same old life day in and day out for decades.
The other woman was his graduate student. Lucy Maud couldn’t imagine that the woman was that much more adventurous, but she was younger for sure. She still had that drive, that ambition, that Lucy Maud had once had but had abandoned long ago, first because they had moved so much—to Kevin’s MA program in Oxford, Mississippi, then to Nashville for the PhD, then to Knoxville for a visiting professorship, then finally to Austin—and second, because of Boyd. After leaving jobs in so many towns, Lucy Maud felt nearly unemployable, and when Boyd was born, the net difference between wages and child care had not made it seem worth being employed. Boyd had been born in Nashville, and by then Kevin’s teaching stipend had been large enou
gh for them to scrape by, so she’d stayed at home and had never gone back to work full-time. When they’d separated, Kevin had let her stay in the lake house and left her an allowance, though now she hoped to earn money from wedding planning. She had no room for a sense of adventure anymore; she lived too close to the bone to crave that sort of excitement. But to get her husband back, she was willing to do just about anything.
“Pull over here,” she said, inching her hand up his thigh. They were on the highway, passing a historical marker. Cars were flying by.
He jerked his leg away from her hand, swerving as he did so. “Jesus Christ, Lucy Maud! You almost made me hit that eighteen-wheeler.” He looked at her sideways and kept driving.
The humiliation stung. In their marriage, he’d always complained that she had never initiated sex. Well, it was true. She didn’t know how. Even when she’d felt like doing so, she couldn’t bear the possibility of rejection. Then, when she’d gone through menopause, she had felt that part of her life was over, that she had lost all interest.
She thought about unzipping his pants and lowering her face to his lap. He was not likely to turn that down, after having begged for it on so many road trips. But, no, it was only half-hearted anyway, because she was trying to prove something and was not genuinely interested, and besides, here they were turning into Aunt Fern’s driveway. Lou’s car was out front, and Fern was in her chair on the front porch. She raised a hand as they approached, and Lucy Maud couldn’t tell if she knew who they were. But no, if Aunt Fern was having a bad day, Lou was usually right there next to her, sitting and swinging her foot, drinking coffee all the way until dinnertime.
But Lou had heard the car pull into the drive and emerged now from the house, waving with one hand and cradling her phone to her ear with the other. As Lucy Maud and Kevin got out of the car, Lou hung up the phone and set it on the porch railing. Her face was lined with worry: two diagonal slashes between her eyebrows, parentheses around her mouth.
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