by Dave Eggers
“Why don’t you guys go back to the Chateau for a second?” she said. “Get something to drink. I want to look around some more.”
Paul and Ana did not seem enthusiastic about moving anywhere, but when Josie presented them the key to the Chateau, they couldn’t pass up the opportunity to unlock the door themselves. They would not get drinks or rest, she knew. They would play at locking and unlocking the door until she returned.
When they had run down the path and were out of sight, Josie went back to the cabin. She tried the front door and found it locked. She went to the back and it was shut, too. She had figured this, so then did what she’d planned to do, which was to walk back and forth along the back and side, looking for the smallest window.
The smallest window was in the kitchen, a grid of six panes. Josie took an elephant leaf from a nearby plant, wrapped it around her fist, and punched the glass.
It did not break. Her hand ached with the heat of a hundred suns. She dropped to one knee, cradling her fingers, cursing herself. In a few minutes she had recovered, and searched for a rock. She found a sharp one of about five pounds, and rapped it forcefully against the glass. Again the window did not break. She backed up, threw the rock underhand at the glass and missed, striking the side of the house. Finally she picked the rock up, held it overhead, and rammed it into the window. Now the glass gave way.
She waited, listening for any reaction from her children or anyone who might secretly be dwelling inside the cottage. Hearing nothing, she threw the rock away and went back to find her children.
They were playing with the key and the Chateau lock. Ana had cajoled Paul into being inside the RV while she was outside, trying to make the key fit.
“Knock knock,” Ana said.
“You have the key,” Paul said from within. “Why are you knocking?”
When Ana noticed Josie behind her, she looked momentarily crazy with alarm and guilt.
“Come with me,” Josie said, and Ana relaxed. “I have something interesting to show you.”
A very good thing about her children at this age: Whenever she said she would show them something interesting, they invariably believed her. They always thought she would actually show them something interesting. They dutifully followed her back up the sunlit trail to its end. This time she let them climb the fence, too, and she led them to the back of the cabin.
“What do you see?” she asked.
“Broken window,” Paul said.
“What do you think we should do?” she asked.
The two children stared at her.
“What would happen if this was left open, this window, in a forest like this?” she asked.
“Animals,” Ana said.
“They’d get inside,” Paul added.
Josie had a plan but wanted her children to believe it was theirs.
“Right,” Josie said. “So what should we do?”
“We should tape it shut or something,” Paul said.
“But how?” Josie said. In that moment she observed herself critically, using the Socratic method on her kids in the hopes that they would suggest that Ana crawl through the broken window.
“One of us could crawl through and find a key,” Paul said.
They were wonderful people, her children. Then she thought: Exactly how many misdemeanors would her family commit in this unassuming state?
“Or just open the door from the inside,” Josie suggested with a noncommittal shrug.
Paul and Ana took the bait and set out on the path, seeming very serious about the task before them. After arriving at the broken window and allowing Paul and Ana to inspect it with the authority of glass-repair contractors, Josie relocated the cottage’s welcome mat to the window sill and draped it over the broken window’s lower ledge. Then she suggested, with all the moral seriousness of the naming of a saint, that Ana was the only human alive that could successfully make it through such a small gap, crawl down to the table below, then to the floor, then to the front door, to open it for her mother and brother.
Ana blinked hard. She couldn’t believe it. The old restless soul in her seemed to know exactly what Josie was up to, but the actual five-year-old sharing Ana’s corporeal form was alive to the adventure of it all and chose to ignore the voice within her that knew better.
Josie lifted her, Paul’s hands ready below, and Ana’s stomach shifted back and forth, like a beached shark, across the welcome mat, then, in an electrifying bit of improvisation, Ana did a front somersault—slow motion, never airborne—to get to the kitchen table below the window. Ana stood on the table for a moment, pretending to be assessing but actually just preening, knowing she was being watched and admired. Then, without fanfare, she jumped to the floor and ran to the front door as if she’d lived in that cottage all her life. By the time Josie and Paul arrived at the door, Ana had opened it and was tapping an imaginary watch on her tiny wrist.
Then she relaxed and smiled, like a host who had chosen to forgive tardy guests in the interest of preserving the mood. “Welcome!” she said.
Josie explained to them that they would need to tape the window shut from the inside—only from the inside would it work or hold through the rains and winds. So they went into the cottage, smelling its raw woods, the faint scents of mildew and detergent—of attempted order—and they looked for duct tape and cardboard. Soon they had found both and had repaired the window, or at least made it impenetrable to insects and small mammals.
But Josie’s intention was not only to fix the window, but to stay here, at least until she’d decided on a next step. The location could scarcely be better. She rifled through the drawers in the kitchen until she found a key, tried it in the front door. It worked. She had a key to the cabin. “I think we should stay here tonight,” she said casually, “just to make sure the place is safe and our window repair holds.”
Paul and Ana agreed. Or just shrugged. They didn’t care. There was no longer any logical pattern to their lives.
“Hold on a sec,” she said. Leaving the kids in the cabin, Josie jogged down to the Chateau and pondered exactly what to do with the vehicle. She couldn’t leave it at the gate.
She looked around and saw, inside the gate and across the parking lot, a prefab garage made of corrugated steel, its door open. She expected it to be filled with vehicles or whatever else the park rangers might make use of, but it was largely empty. The shutdown: this was where the ranger had parked his truck, and now he was gone. It looked tall enough to hold the Chateau.
Josie examined the lock at the end of the chain. It was a standard padlock that held together the heavy chain threaded through the gate and post. Her first thought was to attack the lock itself with one of the wrenches she’d seen in the Chateau toolbag. She had a jack there, too, but assumed that the padlock was designed to withstand the blows of simple steel and iron implements.
She stood in the lace-white light of the morning, staring at the gate, and when she thought of the solution, she laughed. It was ridiculous, and it would work, and once she had done it she would laugh about it always, in the years to come, the ease of the gambit, the fact that they had really done it. It was a criminal act, something between breaking and entering and simple vandalism, but it would work beautifully.
In minutes she was back at the cottage and had found the saw hanging over the mantel. And then she was running down the path again, the saw held over her head with two hands. She returned to the gate and began sawing the post. She started very low, so that when she returned the post to its position, the grass growing around its base might hide the fact that she’d cut through it. Working without rest, for she worried that at any moment her kids would be upon her, witnessing this, her most bizarre and criminal act yet, she sawed through. The lock was still attached of course, but it was now attached to a post that was unattached, that swung with the open gate.
She drove the Chateau through the gate and slowly guided it into the prefab garage, expecting the top to scrape any moment. It fit, t
hough, was meant to fit, so she drove it in, and closed the doors to the garage when she was finished. The Chateau was invisible. She took a few hundred dollars from the velvet bag, shoved it deep into the corner of the cabinet, afraid to count what was left, and locked the Chateau door. She returned to the gate for the best part of it all. She replaced the post atop its foundation, balancing it such that it still looked like a functioning, unaltered pillar. If anyone touched it, or if a strong wind came, it would come apart, but for the time being it looked legitimate, unaltered.
—
They were likely free from any possibility of being found, at least for a day or two. Whatever park rangers were left in Alaska were occupied with the fires, or were far away, out of state even, enjoying fine weather on a shutdown holiday.
Josie and the children inspected the cabin, the children immediately finding the stairs and running up to the pitched-roof attic.
“Not much up there,” Paul said upon returning. “Two small beds, but it smells.”
Most of the cabin’s life was on the main floor, with the fireplace determining the location of all other objects in the room. The futon and chairs were pointed toward the hearth, and most of the decorations surrounded it. On the mantel, a variety of fishing memorabilia, a horse carved from wood, a beaver rendered in a slab of bark. Crossed over the mantel like swords were a pair of wooden snowshoes, and over them, an ancient spear. To the left of the fireplace, the wall was covered with firewood.
In the kitchen, there were two old stoves, neither of them functional, and a formica table, three chrome chairs around it, each with a yellow plastic seat somewhere ripped and duct-taped. There was a sink, but no running water; instead, there was a water bubbler, almost full. A functioning refrigerator sat low in a corner, and next to it, drawers with aluminum foil, Tupperware containers, duct tape, scissors and string. A platoon of knives was magnetically attached to the wall, all facing right with soldierly anticipation. A small cabinet over the stove was stocked with canned soup and vegetables. Between the food they had in the Chateau and this, Josie thought, they could get by for a while.
“Look,” Ana said. In the main room, the kids had found a stash of games, all of them forty years old, maybe more. Scrabble, Parcheesi, two decks of cards, Sorry! Josie half-expected to see Candyland, and have a brief spiral of stabbing thoughts, but when she scanned the stack, she didn’t see it. Then Paul did. It was under the shelf holding the rest of the games.
“I’ve heard of this,” he said, brushing the dust from the box. “How come we never had this game, Mom?”
“Who wants to make a fire?” Josie asked.
Paul and Ana delighted in choosing the right newspapers, kindling and logs, and in minutes there was a thundering fire. At the earliest opportunity, she planned to throw the game into it. But for now, she had distracted her children enough to hide it above the fridge.
In the kitchen, she found a transistor radio, turned it on and looked for news. Could there be some search going on for her? Some news of the death or maiming of a process server at the hands of diner vigilantes? She could muster only a faint signal, an evangelical message, telling listeners that God wanted them to prosper not just spiritually but materially. “Prosper is a word rooted in the three-dimensional world,” the man said.
On the counter there was a photo of the man she assumed was the ranger who usually occupied the cabin. He was about forty, cheerful-seeming, with a red beard and wearing green and khaki. He had his arm around another man, also bearded, with the same cheerful eyes. A brother maybe, a lover, a husband? In any case she was contented to know the ranger who lived there, a man in love or capable of love, seemed less likely to chase them than the owner of the last cottage where they’d squatted.
“I have to sleep,” Josie said. She hadn’t rested in more than a day. Josie demonstrated the futon to the kids, and she could see their minds assessing whether or not they could all fit on it; she was sure they wouldn’t want to sleep in the dark and drafty attic. She descended onto the padding, provoking a small cloud of dust. She did not care. Sleep pulled her down.
“Are we living here now?” Ana asked.
Josie fell asleep, thinking it a very real possibility.
XIX.
IN THE AFTERNOON, having slept through the day, Josie felt reborn. She raised herself from the futon, feeling unaccountably strong, and noticed that her children were nowhere in sight.
She called to them. No answer. She leapt up, her heart in her mouth. She pictured a pair of wolves carrying them off. She yelled their names.
“Out here,” Paul said.
She threw open the door to find Paul and Ana outside, on the gravel walkway, huddled around a black mass of fur.
“What is that?” Josie roared.
The fur shook and whimpered.
“It’s a dog,” Ana said, and took its face in her hands and turned it toward Josie, as if to demonstrate the nature of the species to her unknowing mother.
“It was scratching at the door,” Paul said.
They’d opened the door, and the dog had quickly slipped inside.
“We didn’t want to wake you up, so we brought her out here,” Paul said. He was telling the truth. He was frighteningly considerate. But whose animal was this?
“Does he have a collar?” she asked.
“Just this,” Ana said, and pulled a plastic flea collar from its neck. Ana had moved to the side, revealing the full shape of the dog. It was tiny and black and looked like a malnourished pig, with short hair and triangular ears.
“It’s shivering,” Josie noted.
“She’s hungry,” Paul said.
“Keep your hands away from its mouth,” Josie said.
“Her mouth,” Paul said. “It’s a girl.”
“If you get bitten you’ll be in the hospital for days,” Josie said. “And we’re not near any hospitals.”
“Can we feed her?” Paul asked.
“Did you name her yet?” Josie asked.
“Ana did,” Paul said.
“Follow,” she said.
“That’s her name: Follow,” Paul clarified.
“Because she followed us,” Ana said. Last year she named a fish Waterlover.
“I thought you said she scratched at the door,” Josie said.
Paul had a way, when caught even in the whitest of lies, of staring at Josie, unblinking, for a few long seconds before he spoke. It was not done out of any sense of strategy. It was more that he was seized by, inhabited by, a kind of truth spirit that insisted upon full revelation. He took a deep breath and began.
“We went outside. Just to get some sticks,” he said, indicating a small pile of sticks that, with orange duct tape, they’d made into swords. “When we were walking back, she started following us. We closed the door, and she started scratching on it.”
Paul exhaled in a quick burst, as if in punctuation and relief. He was happy to have gotten through it, the unadulterated truth. His posture relaxed and he allowed himself to blink.
“Can we feed it?” he asked again.
—
So they had a dog. They brought Follow inside, and fed her old fried chicken and salad, and she devoured it. Josie knew what a bad idea it was to feed a stray like this, but the animal seemed traumatized, unable to stop shivering. She conjured a narrative whereby she was the ranger’s dog, but had run away, and the ranger, unable to find her, had left without her. Then she’d returned to find him gone, the door locked, and her tiny self surrounded by a murderers’ row of higher carnivores only too happy to lunch on her vibrating flesh. Somehow she’d survived the days since, but was a wreck of nerves and was starving to boot.
Josie examined the dog, looking for cuts or fleas or some sign of disease, and found her to be startlingly clean for a dog that had been out in the wild for days or weeks. “You can pet her,” she told her children, and she sat on the futon, watching them fawn over Follow, as the dog shook and ate, and shortly after eating, fell fast asleep. T
hey continued to pet her black fur as she slept, as she breathed unevenly, her hind legs periodically jabbing at the floor.
Josie had the feeling that with Follow, they had become some kind of frontier family. They broke windows and altered gates. They took in strays. And they hadn’t even been in the cabin one night. The kids would not leave Follow, so they stayed inside as the night came on, and Josie built a fire, and the winds outside whistled an eerie tune. The cardboard they’d taped over the kitchen window inhaled and exhaled but held. She brought her children with her under the covers, and they slept through the night, Paul’s arm hanging to the floor, where he could be sure of Follow’s well-being.
A ringing woke her. It was still dark, the fire weak. Who could be calling? She hadn’t even seen a phone. She slipped out of bed and to the kitchen, hoping the kids would sleep through it. In the dark she swept her hands over the counter, and finally, under a pile of maps, found a landline. It was still ringing. Three rings, four, each one rattling the cabin. She couldn’t pick it up. Finally after six rings, it ended.
Paul and Ana were still asleep, but Josie knew she would be awake for hours. She brought a chair out to the deck and sat, jittery, listening to the night, running through possibilities. She wanted to believe the phone call was random, or simply intended for the ranger who lived there. But then there was the possibility that it was Follow’s owners. Or the process server. Or the police.
No one is looking for us, she told herself. She even manufactured a scoff, meant to put herself at ease.
“Mom?”
It was Ana, alone, on the porch. Josie couldn’t remember Ana ever getting out of bed alone. Usually, when she was out of bed after hours, it was part of a scheme Paul had conceived, a dual attack meant to prove that sleep was impossible for all in the house. Really, though, it meant that Paul hadn’t been able to sleep, had woken up Ana and brought her with him. Only Paul was burdened with the near-death implications of sleep and the night’s invitation to consider mortality and insignificance. Ana was too young to have come to these places.