“I told you last night—”
“Do better than what you told me—”
“Are you taking me back to San Francisco?” I ask her. “We’re heading south—”
“We’ll pick up I-80 toward Nevada. There’s a town called Elko,” she says. “We’ll figure out what our next steps are from there, but I need to know more about you before I decide what to do—”
By four o’clock, the afternoon’s turning syrupy, hours of driving already behind us. She pulls over at a rest stop so we can stretch our legs, use the restrooms. Pepsi and cheddar cheese Combos from the vending machine.
“I’ve been keeping a journal,” I tell her when she’s back at the car. “It’s the best I can offer to tell you about myself, why I found you, how I’m involved in all this—I’ll let you read it. It will tell you everything—”
“Go ahead and start,” she says. “Read it while I drive—”
I read from the beginning, “‘Her body’s down in Nine Mile Run, half buried in river mud,’” but Albion stops me after only a few pages, once I’ve read about my session with Simka, when I told him the name of the body I’d found.
“I knew her,” she says. “I remember Hannah—”
Albion’s connection to Hannah, or their potential connection, never occurred to me until now—beyond their separate relationships to Timothy, to Waverly. Albion always sliding away from me toward her disappearance, Hannah Massey always emerging, someone I’m excavating. Thinking of them together unsettles me.
“Did you know her well?”
“Not very well,” she says, speaking to the miles of highway in front of us more than she’s speaking to me. “Waverly was interested in her. He was a lecturer from time to time—he said it kept his mind elastic to be around so many intelligent young people, that it helped keep his work fresh for his company, Focal Networks. I remember when he told us about Hannah—there were about eight of us eating together that night. We’d just said prayers when Waverly said something about finding a flower growing in a barren field. Anyway, he was enthusiastic about a student in one of his classes, and asked me to get to know her, me and Peyton—”
“Is that how it worked? Did you recruit women to live at the house?”
“Recruit might not be the right word,” she says, “and Hannah never lived with us. We introduced ourselves, spent time with her. She was an actress and was interested in modeling, so there was a natural connection with me and Peyton. She was impressed by Waverly, impressed by us. She came to the house for prayer group, sometimes, but never lived there—”
“Do you know how she died?” I ask, but the question closes her off. I know I’ve bungled something, though I’m not exactly sure what—maybe the bluntness of the question, maybe scratching at a wound she thought had healed years ago. After a few minutes, I say, “Albion, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t pry. I didn’t mean to sound so callous or direct about someone you knew. I don’t mean any disrespect to her—”
“It’s all right,” she says, but turns on the radio and eventually the oldies ease us.
—
We arrive in Elko late and check into the Shilo Inn, a stretch of white motel with the feeling of an emptied swimming pool. Once we drop our bags, she takes me to a sports bar called Matties and tells me to bring my journal. After midnight. We sit in a corner booth far from the windows, scanning the front door whenever someone new drifts in. Terrified and anxious about the faces we might recognize. She asks me to start my journal again from the beginning. She listens carefully, stopping me every so often to clarify something I’d written or to ask me to fill in details about my life. I read until two, when Matties is closing and we retreat to our rooms at the Shilo.
A few days in Elko. We spend most of it at Matties or wandering slow laps around the Elko Junction Shopping Center, lost in conversation or sitting for hours in the food court while I read my journal to her, only retreating to our hotel rooms once everything’s closed and the streetlights blink yellow. I read to her about Theresa, and Albion supposes she may have known her—that she once took a class on container gardening at Phipps. “The teacher was kind of quirky,” she says. “Longish hair, blonde? I liked her. I remember she liked to tell jokes—”
Matties lets us linger for hours—we’re picking at chocolate cake and sharing a pot of coffee when I read her my description of how we met, the moment I first saw her in the gallery in her white dress, her pockets filled with flowers. I close the journal, set it aside, finish the cake.
“There’s a house in New Castle,” she says.
“New Castle, Pennsylvania? Is that where you’re heading? Near Pittsburgh?”
“We’ll be safe there,” she says. “Sherrod helped me buy it anonymously a few years ago. It’s meant to be a safe house, someplace to hide. It could work for a little while—”
“When they killed him, they took his Adware,” I remind her. “They’ll know what he knew—”
“Sherrod was careful,” she says and I want to say, Not careful enough, but let the obvious slip past.
We leave Elko the next morning, sharing the drive to New Castle—we eat Bob Evans or IHOP for every breakfast, pushing through the days and staying at whatever Express hotel we come to when we’re each too tired to drive. Albion loops audiobooks through her Adware to the stereo—she prefers centuries-old books, Longfellow and the like, Tennyson and Shakespeare. We make it through Jane Eyre twice. We listen to old French music as the evenings descend—acoustic jazz and folk, Carla Bruni and Boris Vian. When she’s asleep I shut down my Adware and just listen to the radio, country twang through most of the country, or stations filled with evangelism, but I listen to that promise of God’s love because even those preachers’ voices are easier to take than the silence, when all the death I’ve been hounding coalesces and hangs in my thoughts like butchered meat.
Night by the time we drive through Ohio, the landscape changing to something as forgotten but familiar as my mother’s voice—flatlands giving way to the warp of fields and the hills that will become the mountains of what was once Pittsburgh. We cross into Pennsylvania. We reach New Castle late—I pull in the driveway and cut the engine, the sudden lack of sound and movement dragging Albion from her reverie. I switch off the headlights and we sit looking at the place—the aluminum siding, a dead crab apple tree in the front lawn, untended bushes close against the front porch. No electricity and no heat, so we bring flashlights and set up camp in the living room. Albion paces the hallways. I hear her footsteps on the hardwood, hear her footfalls creaking upstairs across the ceiling, hear her coming back down the rickety stairs. She screams, but by the time I run to her she’s already laughing—she trains her flashlight to the kitchen wall just above the electric stove, illuminating a smiling pig’s face that had been spray-painted there some time ago, loopy eyes and a lolling mouth, the words Welcome home! scrawled in a speech balloon.
• PART III •
WESTERN PENNSYLVANIA
8, 18—
New Castle, Pennsylvania—about an hour, maybe an hour and a half, outside of what the EPA maps out as the Pittsburgh Exclusion Zone. PEZ, it’s called. New Castle was a mill town once, the industrial machinery and warehouses sprawling along the bank of the Shenango in disuse now since Pittsburgh. The houses sag and are worn like cardboard boxes left in the rain. Downtown must have been vibrant once in a long past decade, the newest building now a Sprint wireless store, but otherwise we’re left with a Giant Eagle, a Dollar Blowout, a Kentaco Hut, a Dairy Queen only intermittently open. There are rumors we’ll get a Walgreens sometime soon. Just down 65, a little closer to Pittsburgh, is PEZ Zeolite, but the money from all those government cleanup contracts hasn’t flowed to New Castle—most of it’s gone up to Youngstown, far enough away from the exclusion zone for the cleaners and engineers to settle their families. There’s a Walmart not too far away in Ohio, and on weekends we have a farmer’s an
d flea market in the school parking lot. Albion’s house is on the outskirts. She bought the place for cash—she said it only cost the equivalent of a few months’ rent of her loft back in San Francisco. A two-story Victorian with claustrophobic rooms and warped hardwood floors. I bought a bookcase for Albion but had to prop up the front with folded towels because the living room sags so deeply down from the edges to the center. The kitchen’s a work in progress with mildewed wallpaper to peel, cabinets to repaint, a floor that needs a fresh layer of sticky tiles or maybe just stripped back to the hardwood. I’ve tried to paint out Mook’s graffiti pig with several coats of primer, but the damn thing still shows faintly through. There’s an acre or so of patchy yard before the neighbor’s fence. We have a garage made of cinder blocks and a few pines in the back.
Tracking Albion in the Archive gave me a wildly inaccurate impression of the woman I’ve come to know—now I realize that all her interest in fashion and design, which I took only as something artsy, is a symptom of a larger rage for order and self-reliance. She makes all her own clothes, by and large, and cooks every meal—I haven’t had takeout for weeks, but she’ll go to Dairy Queen with me for sundaes. She jogs several miles before dawn and by the time I get up and pour my first cup of coffee, she’s already out tending her garden, a twenty-by-twenty patch of vegetables we use for cooking. I sometimes wander out with my coffee and sit on a folding chair to watch her, helping only when she wants help. A few months ago she’d washed out the black dye she had when I first met her in the gallery—her natural hair’s no longer the startling crimson I’d known from the Archive, but a chestnut shade of red that seems brown in the dim but like changing autumn leaves in the light.
Every Sunday morning Albion drives us south into the wildlife refuge and we walk for hours along the trails—muddy paths and creeks cutting through underbrush, ugly reedy groves and metal signs warning not to drink the water for fear of radiation or animal contamination, scum-skinned lakes with mucky swathes meant as beaches. Miles and miles, the kind of woods I grew up with—nothing majestic, just Ohio and Pennsylvania scrub, but Albion finds charm here. She knows birdcalls and identifies flitting shadows I’m never quick enough to see. She’s a good hiker, she drives our pace—I often fall behind, heaving for breath and sweating, and when we hit upward slopes my knees crackle like damp sticks breaking and I figure I’ll need to lose even more weight or my joints will just give out some day, but I’m happy to try to keep up with her.
Sometimes I lose patience with my trepidation and broach questions about her past. “You once mentioned that you and Peyton were sometimes sent out to recruit other girls,” I say on one of our hikes, working to keep my wind, to match her gait.
I never know if I’ll push her away when I ask questions like these—I’ve lost entire days to her silence when I’ve overstepped—but over the past few months I’ve come to believe that Albion wants to talk about the raw areas of her life, only it’s difficult for her. She’s guarded herself with strict boundaries, and seems to weigh each exchange she has with me against her vulnerability. I’ve learned that talking at the house about anything other than our life together is off-limits, but that she’s much more willing to talk candidly when we’re in these woods—I don’t know if it’s because she feels protected or removed out here, or if she feels a sense of grace in nature that turns her confessional.
“We were loosely affiliated with the King of King’s parish and if we ever spoke with members of that church, we talked about ourselves like we were a foster home,” she says. “Some of the girls came to us through that church—but Kitty was particular in who she would accept for residence. You’re right, though, there was recruitment involved, especially on campuses. One or two of us would make friends with the same girl and invite her to worship with us. We’d try to make contact with her every day, usually more than once a day, and eventually we’d try to preempt her other friends. Every so often one of us would be too aggressive and we’d lose her, but usually young women on their own want to meet other women. We picked foreign exchange students or women who were already looking for a community of faith. We’d go to prayer services on campuses and watch for girls who came alone—”
“Hannah didn’t seem vulnerable,” I tell her. “She had plenty of friends—”
“We wouldn’t have been successful with Hannah in the long run,” she says.
“But this was something you were actively involved in?” I ask her. “Meeting girls and bringing them to back to the house with you—”
“I was very religious,” she says. “I don’t know if you’d understand if you’ve never been religious, or if you’ve never felt something so strongly that you think it’s God. I thought I was helping those girls—”
When I don’t answer, she says, “You know, I really fucked up my life. I can’t have that back—all those years of shitty choices. It wasn’t until after I was free of Timothy and Waverly and that house did I feel the weight of what I’d done to those women—it’s like a panic, whenever I realize what I helped do. I didn’t know what would happen to them, what Timothy and Waverly did to them—all that time I thought I was helping bring them closer to what I called Jesus. I was deluded and still feel sick, physically sick, when I think of my part in that house. I had to stop believing in God before I realized what it meant that we all bear the weight of the cross. I had to stop believing in God before I wanted to atone for what I’d done in His name—”
Albion pushes the pace and I fall behind—I can’t keep up with her when she picks up speed, but I also realize I’m not meant to, so I slacken my pace and let her pull away. Whenever we come to a creek or some vein of running water, she pauses to listen. She once asked me if I was a Christian and I told her that I wasn’t, that I don’t believe in God.
“You believe in love,” she said.
—
The New Castle Farmers’ Market and Super Flea, perfect for plums. Saturdays the worst for crowds, aisles difficult to thread through, vendors in tents or wooden-framed booths draped with tarps. Steelers jerseys, Confederate flags, bootleg MMA sims, strawberries—I still need strawberries. Strawberry rhubarb cupcakes for Albion, if I can figure out the recipe. Scroll, scroll: one-quart saucepan, heat strawberries, rhubarb, sugar, flour, butter. Four of five stars, but sounds easy. Do we need butter? Ping Albion and ask, Do we have butter? Rhubarb, ten dollars for a bundle from Tuscarawas Farms—SmartShopper says I can do better.
Good on butter, pings Albion.
I purchase a package of plums. Booths of jarred preserves, bell peppers in plastic wrap, gourmet marshmallow cubes, dark honey of Ohio. The aisle’s capped with a booth for the handmade ginger soap Albion likes, so I grab a few bars and pick up a dozen bananas Foster marshmallows. Trust SmartShopper when it flashes BEST BUY on a package of rhubarb sprigs.
I buy groceries from lists she writes and she prepares our dinners. She has me on a vegetarian diet. With our walks and what I’ve been eating, I’ve lost weight—I feel trimmer than I have in years. I try to dress up for our dinners, sometimes even wearing Gavril’s suit if I know she’s making something special. I pour wine and set the table, just the small kitchen table, and she serves our food. Albion still likes the act of prayer, to remember what her life was once like and what it has become, but says she doesn’t know what or who she prays to any longer. I bow my head and clasp my hands and say “amen” when she’s finished but spend my time thinking over what I’ve lost but also what I’ve found.
I clean the dishes while she works in her studio. I tidy up the place as best I can. Around nine I brew tea and around nine thirty she joins me on the sofa and we talk. Most nights we talk about art. She shows me her designs and sometimes I read to her. At some point it became tacit between us that Albion would leave behind making images of the house in Greenfield if I started to write poetry again—that we would help each other move forward. We go to bed nearing midnight and every night I wonder if
we’ll kiss good night, but we never have. She uses the only bed. There’s a mattress on the second bedroom floor and an antique trunk she found for fifteen dollars at a Goodwill I use for my clothes and books. I lie on my mattress staring out the window into the dark tops of our pines until I no longer hear the soft sounds of Albion readying herself for bed. I can’t sleep until she’s asleep.
I can never have Theresa back.
She’s been deleted and Albion believes that even Mook couldn’t have brought her back, that Mook’s work is thorough. She asks how we met.
“It’s not a romantic story,” I tell her.
“It’s romantic to me,” she says.
“So, there was a conference every year about social networking tools called PodCamp,” I tell her. Albion wants to see the moment I met Theresa, so we immerse together—strolling downtown Pittsburgh like tourists in a foreign city lost to time. The City’s working through its infinite loop of weather, the sky a leaden ceiling, snow and rain slurring into an intolerable frozen mush that grays out the buildings and dampens everything. From certain angles, there is a beauty to these downtown streets, even on days like this, when car windows fogged and people huddled in grotesque wet coats, using umbrellas and slipping on the sidewalks. It’s November in the City. Windshield wipers brush away globs of snow. Albion and I duck into the Courtyard Marriott where it’s warmer, and sit together in the lobby drinking hot cocoa. Despite the weather, dozens of people arrive for PodCamp—designers, students, young professionals, all dressed better than the rest of us wading through the muck outside. I scan their faces, recognizing people whose names I’ve forgotten.
Albion and I wander the hotel hallways together, looking behind room doors at televisions playing to empty rooms and out-of-town travelers inadvertently filmed as they fetched ice from the vending machines or went to the pool or checked into their rooms, their images trapped in the Archive like ghosts haunting wrong, unfamiliar places. Throughout the morning the PodCamp attendees settled into folding chairs to listen to PowerPoint presentations and take notes in PodCamp binders, but after lunch the sessions became more specific. The room was called Partitioned Conference Room B, and the session was “Generating a Realistic Income with WordPress and Affiliate Marketing.” There were only six of us registered. Theresa came in just after me—a peach blouse and blue jeans, a suede jacket, her hair longer then. She doesn’t come in now. She sat a few seats away, I remember, and I stammered when I introduced myself.
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