The Wildlands

by Abby Geni

  Seated behind the wheel of her father’s pickup truck, still dressed in her work uniform, Darlene stared up and down the street. The sky was heavy, the clouds hanging low. Her old house was gone, of course. The concrete crater of the basement swam with shadows. In the distance, a few isolated, sagging walls—still vaguely reddish after all this time—stood where the barn once was. Darlene climbed out of the car, and the drizzle enveloped her in a gauzy embrace.

  What instinct had carried her to this spot? She felt that she was searching for something, waiting for something. As she approached the absence of her former home, droplets of rain kissed her skin. The basement was shallower than she remembered. There was her father’s workbench. The cement floor was smudged with mud. The stairs were warped and treacherous now, the wood rotten. Darlene heard the skitter of mice.

  More than a month had passed since Cora’s last phone call. No contact since, no word. Cora was somewhere in America, on the road, on the run.

  Darlene lifted a hand and mimed the surface of the wall that once stood there. The living room window would have been a few inches above her. She reached up and pretended to knock on a nonexistent pane of glass.

  Then she pulled her phone from her pocket and texted Roy: Can I come over? Might be losing my mind.

  Sure thing, he replied.

  But she could not leave. Not yet. Some compulsion kept her poised on the edge of the basement. There was an empty water bottle tossed in a corner. A rusty pair of scissors lay in the mud, the blades yawning wide. Darlene stared down at the door of the tornado shelter. It looked small from this height, sealed shut, partially obscured by a fallen beam. She wanted to go inside. She did not know why she wanted to go inside.

  With a sigh, she closed her eyes, slipping backward through time. Back to the afternoon of the tornado. The wail of the wind. The musty odor inside the shelter. She remembered shutting the door and bracing her back against it. Keeping her brother inside against his will. No, she told him. No.

  That moment—the discord between her and Tucker—led to everything that followed. Him pleading, her refusing. It was a point of friction like a chip in a pane of glass, tiny but unfixable, fissures spreading outward from that initial chink, weakening the structure, leading to the quarrel in No. 43, the black eye, cracks and fractures snaking inexorably onward, worse ruptures, Tucker’s return to Mercy, the bombing of Jolly Cosmetics, Cora stolen away, a sheet of glass dissolving into splinters.

  Darlene inhaled the raw scent of the rain. The drizzle touched her hair gently, smoothing down her bangs. She felt her mind flooded with strange ideas. The tornado was not an act of God, but an act of nature. The wild had come to Mercy that day. As she and her siblings cowered in the bunker, the full force of the wild had roared above them, erasing everything it touched.

  Tucker blamed her for their father’s death. He believed that he would have been able to rescue Daddy from the tornado if she had not interfered. But Darlene knew better. If she had not taken action, her brother would have vanished into the storm too. She was not responsible for Daddy’s death; she was only responsible for saving Tucker’s life.

  Now she wrapped her arms around her body, swaying back and forth in the rain. For the first time, she wondered if she should have just stepped aside back then. Maybe she should have opened the door to the shelter, the final barrier between the human and the wild, and let Tucker go.

  HOURS LATER, DARLENE LAY ACROSS Roy’s bed, watching the rain bejewel the window. It was August. Mercy was experiencing a heat wave that singed the sky and turned the grass into matchsticks. The downpour dampened but failed to cool the charbroiled terrain.

  Beside her, Roy sprawled motionless and prone, so deeply asleep that he scarcely breathed. Their lovemaking always sent him into a fervent state of rest. The uneven light of evening dappled his skin like leopard fur. Darlene took a moment to relish the muscular definition of his torso.

  Then her phone rang. She climbed out of bed—a plush, generous mattress, nothing like the stiff cushions of the couch at home. Roy grunted but did not wake. In the shadows, Darlene knelt down and searched through the objects on the floor, trying to locate her purse. Roy’s house did not have air-conditioning. There were three fans humming in the little bedroom, one in each window and another on the ceiling, creaking with every revolution. The air was a tepid bath.

  At last, Darlene found her phone. The number was withheld. There was a clatter of static, and her nervous system jump-started like a car engine.

  “Who is this?” she said.

  A voice rang out in the distance, all but lost in a flurry of mechanical rustling. The phone went abruptly silent. Disconnected.

  Darlene swore aloud, then glanced back at Roy, who was still sleeping. She pressed a hand to her heart, trying to quiet its clamor. It might have been a wrong number. It might have been anyone. She stared at the blank screen and sank back onto the bed, trying not to feel disappointed.

  Cora had been gone an eternity and no time at all. A single phone call, over a month ago. Nothing since. Darlene remembered her sister’s voice that day, sweetly and cheerfully parroting Tucker’s dreadful rhetoric. Their conversation had emptied Darlene out, carving her hollow.

  She reached for her glasses and polished the lenses before putting them on. The rain was a silver glimmer against a smoky sky. The bedroom felt cozy and overstuffed, every wall crammed with furniture, the bookshelves and bureaus standing elbow to elbow. The various fans competed to brush away her sweat. Roy rolled onto his side, his eyelids fluttering in dreams. Darlene was still sore from their sex. She could feel the echo of lovemaking in her body in the same way she could feel the rock and shift of waves after a day of swimming, long after she left the water.

  Her phone rang again. The screen came to life in her hands, startling her so badly that she nearly dropped it. Once more, the number was withheld. She brought the phone to her ear, fumbling in her eagerness.

  “Hello?”

  There was a gush of staticky breath. Darlene stuck her finger in her free ear. She heard electronic tones and ghostly whispering.

  “Is that you?” she cried. “Are you there?”

  “I’m here.”

  Cora’s voice was higher than Darlene remembered. She sounded so small, so young, her words coming across the airwaves like a kitten’s mewl.

  “Are you all right?” Darlene asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  There was a pause. After a moment, Darlene realized that it wasn’t a pause: the line had gone dead again. She moaned aloud. The signal was strong at Roy’s house, so the fault must be on Cora’s end. Wherever she was—wherever Tucker had brought her now—must be far from cell towers.

  Roy shifted position, his face buried in his forearms. Darlene could not decide whether she wanted him to wake up and comfort her or let her ponder the situation on her own. They had been dating for only a few weeks. Everything between them was still new, at once heightened and uncertain.

  Surely Cora would call back. Surely she would not leave their conversation severed in the middle. Before this summer, Darlene had not understood that waiting was the worst form of torture, more unbearable than physical pain or profound loss. Sometimes she was amazed that she was still surviving it, waiting for Cora with each tick of the clock.

  Her phone rang again. She brought it to her ear before the first chime had finished. There was a crackle of breath.

  “Sorry!” Cora said. “I have to stand in exactly the right place or the phone cuts out.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Someplace with trees.”

  “What kind of trees?”

  “Big.”

  “Are you coming home now?” Darlene said. “Please say you’re coming home.”

  “What? I can’t hear you.”

  “Are you coming back to Mercy?” Darlene cried.

  A burst of furious rustling. For a moment, Cora vanished into crinkly static. Then she murm
ured, “Tucker said no.”

  Darlene’s temper surged, but she restrained herself, exhaling through her nose and counting to ten. She was determined not to repeat the mistakes of their last conversation. No shouting this time. No commands, only questions. She reminded herself that Cora was different now—different in ways that were impossible to parse fully from a distance. Her sister was a changeling. Darlene would treat her accordingly.

  Then Cora coughed. Darlene did not like the sound—a wet rattle.

  “Are you sick?” she said sharply.

  “Just a little.”

  “Did Tucker get you some medicine?”

  “Yeah,” Cora said absently.

  Darlene readjusted her pose on the mattress. She felt an odd tingle of modesty, as though somehow her baby sister might divine that she was dressed only in an old T-shirt of Roy’s, the fabric soft from years of use.

  “I’m glad you called,” Darlene said. “I didn’t like the way things went last time we talked.”

  Cora grunted, a noncommittal response.

  “Tell me about . . .” Darlene paused, choosing her words with care. “Tell me what you did today.”

  “Just stuff. I don’t know.”

  Darlene gritted her teeth. She was trying to divine as much as possible from her sister’s tone. During their last conversation, Cora manifested a kind of giddy elation, but now her voice was flat, quiet, almost lifeless. Perhaps this was meaningful. Perhaps she regretted leaving Mercy. Perhaps it was merely the effect of a sore throat.

  “Tell me anything,” Darlene said at last. “You’ve been gone so long, and I have no idea what things are like for you.”

  Cora let out a long, humming note. “Well, Tucker taught me how to handle a rattlesnake.”

  “He did what?”

  “Did you know that the babies are more dangerous than the adults? The little ones have the same amount of poison as the big ones, but they don’t know how to control it yet. When a grown-up bites you, it squirts out just a little venom and saves the rest. But the babies dump everything into your blood at once.”

  She began to cough again, her dulcet tones transitioning into phlegmy barks. Darlene waited for her to get her breath back. When Cora spoke again, her voice had dropped an octave, the gravely growl of a pack-a-day smoker.

  “Snakes are good citizens,” she said. “They do important work for the planet.”

  “How long have you been coughing like that?”

  “Tucker says I’m getting better.”

  Darlene felt a hand touch her back. Roy was sitting up, stroking her shoulder blades, his face full of concern. Then he reached for his cell phone and began tapping away with his thumbs. She knew that he was texting someone at the police station or the FBI, alerting them to what was happening. The glow from the screen illuminated his face from beneath. He had recently shaved his head, a bald dome of freckled mahogany.

  “Is Tucker with you?” Darlene said. “Is he there now?”

  “He’s always with me,” Cora said.

  “Can I talk to him? Please.”

  There was a pause. Darlene knotted her fingers anxiously in her hair.

  “I have to go,” Cora said.

  “Wait.”

  “Happy birthday. It’s this week, right? That’s why Tucker let me . . .” Her voice grew faint. “I kept asking, and Tucker finally said I could . . .”

  Darlene waited for her sister to finish the sentence, then realized that the screen had gone dark.

  “Are you there?” she shouted. “Cora?”

  Silence. Darlene flung out a hand in wild anger, connecting with the night table. An old-fashioned alarm clock, a tiny ceramic cat, and a science fiction novel tumbled to the floor. The cat shattered. Darlene stared down with a kind of perverse pleasure at the pieces on the rug.

  “I texted George,” Roy said. “He’s at the station today. I’ll get a buzz if they have any luck tracing the call.”

  He leaned past her, examining the mess on the floor.

  “I’ll get the vacuum in a minute,” he said mildly. “Come here.”

  He opened his arms. Darlene folded herself into his embrace, and together they slumped against the headboard, Roy cradling her against his chest. She moved to wipe her eyes, then realized that she was not crying. Perhaps she did not have any tears left.

  31

  In the second week of August, Darlene turned twenty-three. Roy threw her a birthday party at the trailer. It was a Saturday afternoon, the sky cloudless and desiccated, a scorched, flinty shade of blue. As Roy bustled around No. 43 with candles and paper plates, Darlene stared out the window, refusing to help. She had told Roy that she did not want a party, but he disregarded her wishes, deciding with his tone-deaf optimism that she could use some cheering up. Cora’s call, three days earlier, had left her “down in the dumps,” he said. A celebration was just what she needed now.

  Hovering by the window, Darlene felt numb. The next-door neighbors were barbecuing; she could not see them, but she smelled the meat and heard the familiar cadence of a mild marital spat. Other people’s children ran between the trailers, their voices shrill, mingling with the cicada song. Roy set the punch bowl on the kitchen table. Jane was adjusting her headband in the mirror. She had borrowed a swipe of Darlene’s lipstick without asking and painted her fingernails orange. Roy was light on his feet, beaming around at the decorations, and Jane mimicked him, planting her fists on her hips and grinning. Darlene marveled at her sister’s good mood. Jane was full of sass and sarcasm these days—just that morning she pitched a fit about Darlene’s method of scrambling eggs—but with Roy she became a different child. Something about his presence brought out her easygoing side.

  “No one’s going to come to this thing,” Darlene said.

  “My buddies from the station will be here,” Roy said.

  “Some girls from the team are coming,” Jane piped up.

  “I asked a few family friends too,” Roy added. “Folks my mom used to play bridge with. My godfather said he’d drop by. I want them all to get to know you.”

  Darlene gazed blankly at their hopeful faces. Neither of them seemed to realize what they were saying: that her birthday party would be populated entirely by strangers. She turned back to the window.

  An hour later, the trailer was packed. Roy put on a playlist of dance music, a tinny beat in the background. He guided Darlene around by the elbow, welcoming his coworkers and poker buddies to No. 43 as though the place were his too. Jane’s friends from the soccer team arrived en masse, six or seven girls climbing out of a single minivan like clowns from a circus car. Everyone wished Darlene a happy birthday in a perfunctory way, then turned to talk to someone else. Noise filled No. 43, and Roy was the center of attention, shaking hands and offering beers.

  Darlene wondered if temperament was merely a matter of luck. Roy had endured his share of hardship—an absent father, a mother who succumbed to cancer, not to mention growing up black in Oklahoma—but none of it weighed him down. He chose to be a cop because he wanted to help people, to “give something back,” and he never complained about the inherent difficulty of the work. He was in a pleasant mood almost all the time, rising out of sadness like a kite on the wind, pulled skyward by his nature.

  As the afternoon passed, Darlene left the front door open, letting the guests wander in and out, fanning themselves with their hands and chatting with the people they already knew, no one mingling beyond their original cliques. Darlene felt exposed and invisible in equal measure. Everyone was aware of her, Roy’s new girlfriend, but nobody invited her into their conversations.

  Then Roy’s cell phone rang. He hurried off to take the call, disappearing through the front door into a curl of sunlight. Darlene followed, unwilling to stand alone in the middle of her own party. The sun was dazzling, the streamers on the mailbox wilting in the heat. Jane and her friends lounged in the shady grass on the side of the trailer that faced the ravine, bare
legs akimbo, all staring at their phones, evidently texting each other from two inches away. As Darlene watched, the girls burst into laughter that was almost but not quite simultaneous, like cicadas calling and replying within a fraction of a second. A TV blared in the distance. A baby was wailing somewhere. In the summer, everyone in the trailer park opened their windows, and the individual, interior ether of their private lives seeped into the open.

  Roy stood by the ravine with his back to No. 43, talking on the phone. He saw Darlene coming and held up a finger. Ever since he shaved his head—something he did every summer, apparently—Darlene had become intimately acquainted with his scalp. His brow was knotted with concern, and the wrinkles rose beyond where his hairline would have been, his head creased all the way up to its crown.

  He hung up, slipping his phone in his pocket.

  “What happened?” she said.

  “Nothing,” he said. “It can wait.”

  “What is it?”

  “Let’s go enjoy your party. I seem to recall something about chocolate cake.”

  “No,” she said. “Tell me now.”

  He glanced around, checking to see who might be nearby, then led her farther along the edge of the ravine. The sound of voices quieted and the trilling of the insects increased. Grasshoppers leapt around Darlene’s feet, glittering and airy. Their bodies were as long as her palm.

  “That was my contact at the FBI,” Roy said.

  “Did they trace the call?” she asked eagerly.

  “No, they didn’t trace it. I’m sorry.”

  Darlene crossed her arms over her belly with an aggressive movement.

  “The FBI took the wiretaps off your phone,” Roy said.

  “What?”

  “This happened a few weeks ago, apparently.”

  “Weeks?” she gasped.

  “They didn’t tell me either. I’m as pissed as you are.”