We off-road across the overgrown lawn, over bumps and dips that jar my carsick head. It strikes me suddenly that this is too easy, that there is something wrong with being so desperate for workers that they hire people off the street, with no family or friends to recommend them. And then I think of the woman at the coffee shop, how she didn’t mention this place. That must have been intentional. This is a small town and you went to Happy Camp High School and there is no way that woman didn’t know this place existed, but she didn’t mention it. And your mother said the people in Happy Camp hate them.
We break free of the lawn, and we sail down a dirt road, a cloud of dust roaring up behind us, gravel spitting up from beneath the wheels, and your mother says, “We don’t drive this fast when guests are here.” I don’t know why we have to drive this fast now.
And my wrists are twisted awkwardly and they wrench as we take a fast turn and I hiss and readjust them and your mother just laughs; she laughs like she can feel my pain and it tickles her.
* * *
—
We curve to a stop in front of an old tack room with antique farming equipment nailed to the wall: scythes, crooked axes, saws with thin, grated teeth. She bumps me back as she climbs off. I glance up.
“Why are those vultures circling?”
She narrows her eyes against the sun, peers up at the spot where they float in lazy circles. “That’s normal out here,” she assures me with a confidence that chips like a lie. “Things die all the time. This is the wilderness.”
I think: Evidence. I can almost hear your voice in my mind, telling the story of my own disappearance.
Sera Fleece arrived at the ranch at three thirty-seven p.m. on May 12. She immediately noticed the vultures circling overhead. But when she asked, her question was dismissed. Adelaide Bard told her it was normal, in the wilderness, for vultures to circle. And Sera believed her.
The audience groans. How stupid can you be?
“Off,” your mother says.
I climb down. Now that I am out of the car, now that I am no longer driving, the exhaustion creeps in, pleads with me, You want to go home. You want to put on a podcast and zone out. I have to remind myself that I am nowhere near home. I pull back the wings of my shoulders, trying to stretch, but lumps rise from either shoulder blade, tender and weak. I want to burst into tears, and it shocks me, the way my emotions always do. I have a feeling your mother wouldn’t be impressed.
The dogs have followed us, but they are mellow now. They stretch out on the overlong grass and gnaw at their tumors.
“What we need,” your mother says, standing in front of the barn with her hands on her hips, “is a new head wrangler, someone to look after the horses.”
My heart contracts. “Where’s the old head wrangler?”
She scowls. Her face has aged, but her eyes stayed young, lit like she’s swallowed a candle. “Don’t worry about the old wrangler.”
“I just mean, to teach me the job. It might help if I knew who they were?” My every sentence becomes a question around your mother. I feel like I’m at a disadvantage, and I don’t know if it’s exhaustion from the drive or if it is just a quality of hers, to make others feel weak, inferior.
“I’ll tell you what you need to know.”
Suddenly I can’t hold you in any longer. “Do you have family here? Kids?” My voice curves in desperation. I am not good at this. I’m not good at going undercover. I’m not good at wearing my heart anyplace but my sleeve. Neither are you. We share this DNA.
She wheezes like the rasping dogs. “I have a son, and I have a daughter.”
“Where are they?”
Her eyes expand and contract. “I don’t like to talk about personal things.”
“Does anyone else work here? Is there anyone else here?” The quiet has set in, taut in my joints. A horse nickers, but I can’t trace the sound. We are in the bowl of the mountains, where sound curls and ricochets, so it could be right behind me; it could be a mile away. It comes from every and no direction.
“Jed,” your mother says. “But he’s on vacation. Been here six months and he’s already on vacation. That oughta tell you everything you need to know about him.”
With no preamble she moves toward a large barn. It’s painted light blue on one side, but they forgot to prime the wood, so it’s uneven, riddled with splinters and unfinished. I follow her inside, where alfalfa hay is piled high.
“How many horses do you have?”
“Twenty-one. They come and go. Mostly rescues.” Does she mean they come as rescues or they leave as rescues?
She plucks a rusted machete off a bale, then presses it into the baling twine. The twine snaps and the bale spreads. “This Jed came out here from Texas, moved up with his wife. They didn’t last a week!” I am momentarily lost, thinking she has just said they were here six months. “His wife just up and left in the middle of the night. Not a word to me, although this woman was supposed to work for me. She never worked for me. She just left and he stayed here.” As she speaks, she drops the machete, bends over and picks up sections of alfalfa, carries them into the tractor loader and slots them in tight. “That’s what happens out here. This place is a proving ground. You got any problems in your relationship—you’ll see! You can’t hide from anything out here.”
I come to life, gathering alfalfa, helping her load the tractor, trying to prove my worth. But the harder I try, the more I seem to fumble. I shiver and drop hay. I stagger with what she lifts easily. I stuff flakes in the wrong way, so she has to go back and fix them.
“I need someone who can work with the horses and get them ready for the summer. You can do that, right?” She talks like we have a long and storied history, like she goes from conversation to conversation with strangers, thinking they are all the same person following the same thread.
She breaks the twine on another bale and we load that too.
“That’s enough.” She claps her hands together. “You need gloves.” She indicates my arms, which are riddled with tiny, angry red scratches from the alfalfa stalks. I hadn’t even noticed. As I look at them, they start to burn.
“How long have you been here?”
“Too long.” She rushes toward the tractor seat. “You can stand here.” She pounds the step with her foot as she sits up tall in the driver’s seat. “I’ll introduce you to the horses.”
I scurry up onto the step and hold on tight. The tractor is a big green machine with grease in the creases. It throbs to life, and she drives it like she has something to prove.
She laughs at me when she sees how I grip the handles. “It only goes twelve miles an hour.”
I try to smile, but it’s not every day I scam a suspect, walk into a job that I’m not qualified for with a perfect stranger in the middle of nowhere. Lately I feel wrong everywhere. I feel wrong in the world. I laugh when I’m supposed to frown, and I cry when I’m supposed to smile. I’m wearing a mask all the time, and it should be easy to wear one now, for you, but I also feel shaky, listless and limitless. It’s like I’ve fallen into a fantasy world, like I’ve dropped into a podcast.
She should have known right from the start that something was off. She DID know. She knew but she ignored it. She was afraid, but she kept playing, closer and closer to the fire. There’s the threat you can’t see and the threat you CAN see and sometimes the threat you can see seems safer.
We pull up outside the first pasture. She stands and I hop to the ground to get out of her way.
“They each get one flake. Spread them far apart, or they’ll fight.”
Four horses approach the fence, snapping their teeth. They are all different shapes and sizes—a fine-boned Arabian, a sturdy draft mix, a pinto and a small Morgan pony with a flaxen mane and tail. She names them, but in such a jumble, it’s like she’s naming them on the spot.
“Angel Two, Jewel, Kevin and Be
lle Star.” She separates the flakes, hurling them over the fence so they spin, spitting stalks.
The horses fight for who will be fed first. I remember reading somewhere that horses have a pecking order so detailed that they know which horse is number six, number thirty-six, in any given herd. This pecking order comes out when they are fed. They take the flakes in turns. I hurry to help before she finishes without me. I throw the last flake at the fourth horse, which stays well away from the others, nervously prancing back and forth. This is the flaxen pony, Belle Star, and she paws and tosses her golden mane.
“Should I move it?” I say, thinking if I move it closer to her, farther from the other horses, she might take it.
Your mother sniffs. “She’ll figure it out.” She swings back up onto the tractor, and I scamper to follow. Belle Star keeps dancing, as if penned by an invisible fence, tossing her mane, flicking her tail.
We stop at three fields, feed all twenty-one horses—paints and drafts and quarter horses. We roll from pasture to pasture in the tractor, and the landscape begins to take shape. The ranch is cut into the bottom of a mountain. There is a narrow plateau where the cabins rest, a curling chain of white boxes with red shutters. Your mother shows me the boating lake, the shooting range, a miniature train that winds around the property and the horse trails that climb in a sequence of switchbacks up the mountainside. The ranch has everything a guest could ask for, the perfect family vacation, and yet the lawn is overgrown, the cabins are clotted with spiderwebs, the outdoor games are rusted, the pool is mostly drained and the water that remains is the color of old piss. And blackberry bushes grow over everything.
“We’re experimenting,” she says, “with ways to kill them.”
I observe the way your mother sits on the tractor, tethered forward always, tense in a way that makes me look back over my shoulder, shiver at shadows. I wonder what she is afraid of.
As we pass down the hill at the far side of the ranch, a pair of elk bursts through the trees. We watch them pass with a casualness born of confidence. Then your mother releases the brake, and we roll down the hill. We pass a burn pile, left running with quiet embers near the edge of a cliff. Beside it is a modern house painted a dark, deep purple. It stands in contrast with the others, the red-and-whites. It looks like it got lost on its way to San Francisco.
Your mother points. “That’s where Jed is staying. Supposed to be here with ‘his family’; that’s why we gave him all that space. We built it for our son. It doesn’t look big on the outside but it’s big inside. We decorated it, everything exactly how he wanted it.” The engine rumbles beneath her words. “And now Jed lives there.” She jerks a lever and picks up speed.
“Where is your son?” I shout over the roar of the engine, but she doesn’t hear or she ignores me. I remember what you said about your brother. Episode 8: Everything came easily to him; Episode 13: My brother is one of the “good guys”; Episode 33: He swallowed religion and now he’s choking on it.
She drives back into the barn and shuts off the engine. Twilight crept in while we weren’t looking, and it holds everything in a heavenly light, at odds with the stifled atmosphere. Your mother points to her house, set high on the hill over everything. “In the summer we have dinners outside in the garden. We watch the sunset.” She takes off her gloves. “I can give you forty hours a week. Cleaning. Riding. Taking care of the animals.”
“Where would I live?”
“We have a staff cabin. I’ll show you it. It’s nothing fancy, not like where Jed is staying.” She slaps her gloves against her knee. “But we’ll see if he ever comes back.” She leans against the tractor. “You’ll have to make your own food—there’s a kitchen in there. You can’t be expecting to eat with us every meal. We try to make as much of our own food as we can, but there’s not enough to go around. Not yet. You’ll have to take care of yourself when you’re not working.”
“That’s fine.”
“And don’t buy your food in Happy Camp or anywhere around here.”
On cue, my stomach heats with hunger. “Where else can I go?”
“We buy all our food in Ashland.”
“Ashland? Where’s that?”
“Oregon.” Her eyes are fixed.
“. . . Isn’t that kind of far away?”
“It’s only three hours. We go up once a week for supplies. That’s where Emmett is now, visiting friends; he’ll be back in a few days.” Emmett is your father. “I wouldn’t give my money to the people around here or the California government. And you don’t want to hang around Happy Camp. You don’t want to talk to the people there.”
“Why not?”
“Would you want to hang around a bunch of liars?”
“I guess not.”
“We have everything you need here.”
All I have in my car is half a bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. I will need food sooner rather than later, but I am afraid to say anything, afraid to lose my tenuous grasp on this job I am not at all qualified for (if there is any qualification beyond a willingness to disappear).
We take the ATV back to my car, and then I follow her to the staff cabin. It’s a dim, boxed cabin set crookedly on a bright green patch of poison ivy. It reeks of rat shit; I can smell it as I exit the car.
“Obviously we weren’t expecting you.” She opens the screen door and it falls off the hinges. “We don’t lock doors here. There’s no point. If someone wants to get in out here, a lock won’t stop them.” She has left the motor running on the ATV. The cabin opens on a front room, crowded by an old-fashioned pipe stove. “Don’t try to use it, unless you want to burn yourself alive.” She flicks a light switch and nothing happens. “I’ll get Emmett to look into that.” The sunset seems to have exhausted her, and there is a crabbiness as she shows me the various rooms, directs me where to stay. “You should choose this room. The bathroom’s just next door.” She shows me the kitchen and the quilts in the closet. “No heating.” Everything is coated with a thick layer of dust. The floor is a sea of dirty boot prints. “You can clean it yourself. Unpaid, of course.”
The window runners are stuffed with dead flies and black and red beetles. There are spiderwebs draped in every corner; they even wind around the broom. As we move through the house, there is a persistent scratching overhead that I recognize as mice, or rats, and that your mother does not acknowledge.
“That’s it.” She stops back at the door. “Well, I’ll see you tomorrow. Seven o’clock start.” She hops down to the ground because the porch is missing; then she tears off on the ATV, leaving a cloud of dirt behind her.
The lock is broken. In the windowpane there is a crack that looks like it was made by a bullet. The cabin is cold. Although she told me there is no heating, I fiddle with a large wall grate before realizing there is nothing underneath. I pull one of the quilts from the closet and pile it on the slim single mattress. I climb into bed to keep warm, pulling the quilt tight around myself. I have nothing to eat and no time to drive to Oregon. My head is still spinning from the road. I wouldn’t even want to drive to Happy Camp if I could (which I can, I remind myself; your mother doesn’t control me).
I’m here now, like I tripped through the looking glass. I can’t go back. I lost my job, and I haven’t paid rent. They are probably in the process of evicting me. I could go to my parents’ place, but they would put up with me for only a week or two. And it never solves anything; it just keeps me on an endless reset loop.
Out in the world, I am lost. I am less and less every year, but inside your voice, inside your stories, I am a hero, I am a solver of problems, I am a saver of women everywhere. I am a saver of myself. I am home. You are my home.
I have every episode of your podcast downloaded on my phone, and I fall asleep to the sound of your voice, Episode 7: The trees out here feel like they’re alive. I can’t really explain it. You have to experience it for yourself. This plac
e is just . . . You sigh. Crazy.
And then you tell me about the missing Missy Schubert. How she danced. Where is she dancing now?
Episode 9:
The Wrong Place at the Wrong Time
Daisy Queen showed up at the main house at twelve forty-five for a one o’clock appointment, to sell LuLaRoe. Samples of her blood were found on six pairs of leggings and eight perfect tanks.
I wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of voices arguing. They could be miles away or right behind me. The voices could have filtered out from my dreams, which are amplified by the unnatural dark. I grasp for my phone, forgetting I’m not on my bed and then remembering, when the uneven springs coil and retract beneath me. The stink of the place is so full in my nostrils that my temples ache. I try to concentrate on the words but I can’t decipher them. I hear a feral whoop, like someone challenging the dark; then a motor roars and zooms away. I finally find my phone trapped in a tangle of quilt between my legs.
3:37 a.m.
I make a note of it like it might come into play later. She heard a car stop outside at three thirty-seven a.m. She arrived at three thirty-seven p.m., and she heard arguing at three thirty-seven a.m. Like life is a pattern that can be mapped.
I lie on my back in the dark; the only sound is the rodents tickling the wood. I was dreaming about an argument too. Me and my ex-husband. What was it about? My muscles seize as I remember.
I feel like I have no purpose.
If you’d had the baby, you’d have a purpose.
The baby died. In the dream. Why do I have to dream about that? Isn’t it bad enough that it really happened?
The ranch goes quiet—the rodents even stop tickling the wood—and I’m left wondering if the voices were ever really there to begin with.
If I Disappear Page 3