Time passes; how much she’s not sure. The baby’s high-pitched cries surround her, corner her. She recalls Leah’s birth, near the end, when she crouched in the birthing pool like a trapped animal. When the uneven waves of pain transformed into a wild, fiery hurt that gripped her hips and tailbone and wouldn’t let go.
She paces through the nursery. Out the window, Mark’s still there, but his Jeep is running now. Exhaust billows from its tailpipe. Cass thinks of setting the baby in her crib and leaving the room, if only to find out what will happen. She whispers in her ear, “It’s sleepy time, Leah. Mommy’s sleepy, Bear’s sleepy, now it’s time for Leah to go to sleep.” She begins to lay her down, but before her hands reach the mattress the baby lets out a shriek like someone’s poked her with a pin, and Cass scoops her up again.
The headlights of Mark’s car sweep across the cul-de-sac. It pulls away.
Ten minutes later she’s in her own car, wearing a jacket and rain boots over her pajamas. Leah’s buckled into her car seat, still wailing, her arms flapping up and down. Cass backs her car out into the silent cul-de-sac. Behind her house the tall pines tremble in the wind.
She accelerates down the hill, and the noise of the road dampens—by a little—the sound of Leah’s shrieks. They pass dark houses and storefronts, and as they drive through Woodland Park, eerie in the dark, the baby’s cries finally begin to wind down like a toy that needs new batteries. Cass loosens her grip on the steering wheel; she unclenches her teeth. In the mirror attached to the backseat, she watches Leah’s eyelids droop.
But at the stoplight her bawling starts again, and Cass takes the turn toward the highway. Driving ten miles over the speed limit, she passes three dark-windowed coffee huts, a farm stand surrounded by the shapes of pumpkins and gourds, and a pot shop with a glowing reader board that says TASTE OUR NEW EDIBLES.
As she nears the highway, a Jeep just like Mark’s pulls out from the Shell station. It is him—she recognizes his mop of dark hair as she tails his car through the twisting on-ramp. She drives east around the base of the mountain, its jagged snowy top just visible in the light of the thin moon, and soon Leah’s whimpers become halfhearted and punctuated by stretches of silence. Mark’s Jeep is a few cars ahead.
The baby’s silent now. In the mirror, her face is tiny against the padded car seat. Her eyes flutter closed, and then snap open. Then closed again.
In her head Cass composes another email to Amar:
Dear Amar,
It’s 1 A.M. and I’m driving down the highway, following our neighbor Mark. Well, not really. That sounds crazy. But, the baby’s asleep.
Love,
Cass
At every exit she hesitates, intending to turn around, but she keeps going. She relishes the steady whine of the car’s tires on the highway and the monotony of the scenery. Trees, mountain, road. Trees, mountain, road. She thinks of Robby, his eyes bright and his hands in the air, the warmth in his voice when he called on her in class, “What do you think, Cassandra?”
Red brake lights fill the darkness. The cars ahead slow. A sign flashes at the side of the road: RECK AHEAD.
She brakes and stares at the sign, confused by the missing W, and Leah stirs. She realizes a second too late she’s missed the only exit before the backup. While her side of the highway is full of cars, the westbound lanes are strangely empty. Rounding a bend, she sees why: a tractor-trailer, splayed across the highway, blocks traffic in both directions. The bumper of a crushed sedan sticks out from some brush at the roadside.
Another flashing sign informs her there’s a DETOUR AHEAD.
As traffic slows to a crawl, Leah’s eyes blink open and she whimpers. She starts to wail. Cars jostle for a place in the right-hand lane and Cass searches the road for a way out, any means to keep her speed up. But the line for the detour barely moves. The only car not in line is Mark’s. He’s in the left-hand lane. Where’s he going? There’s a space between the guardrails marked EMERGENCY VEHICLES ONLY and his Jeep makes a U-turn onto the westbound highway. As Leah’s cries grow louder, Cass quickly changes lanes and follows him. She pulls through the emergency turnaround, her tires crunching over gravel, and accelerates to catch up.
But the turn is futile. The detour from the westbound side of the highway is being routed ahead of her, and she sees more red brake lights in the distance. She’s going to be stalled on this highway with a screaming baby no matter what she does.
Mark’s Jeep turns onto an exit ramp marked with a state forest sign. She hesitates for a second, and then jerks the steering wheel to follow him, hoping he knows another way back to Clearing. The road climbs toward the mountain. She winds through dense forest and fog appears. The baby’s cries slow. Her little face turns peaceful again in the mirror.
But Cass soon regrets following Mark. They aren’t driving closer to civilization, but farther away. She can’t see more than a few yards in front of her. The fog is dense and deep and chalky white. Long, moss-covered tree limbs crowd the narrow road. She’s got to turn around but there’s no place to stop. She’ll have to wait until the road forks, whenever that might be. She checks her phone—no cell service. Her teeth begin to chatter even though the heat’s on.
She thinks of every news story she’s read about people in Oregon driving down the wrong road and getting stranded, their cars broken down, stuck in mud or snow, buried by an avalanche of rock or ice, or swept away by a quick-rising flood. Broken Mountain is notorious; every weekend someone falls off of it or into it. She remembers the sign she saw at the trailhead near her house that warned her to BEWARE OF YOUR SURROUNDINGS. To watch out for cougars, bobcats, and bears.
Dear Amar,
I’m lost in the woods. Off Exit 42. Somewhere on Broken Mountain. It’s dark, it’s cold, and there’s nothing but trees.
Love,
Cass
She concentrates on the hazy road, alert for wild animals. She’s not sure she’s even following Mark anymore, although every so often she glimpses what she thinks is the outline of his car. Then she stops short—Mark’s Jeep is suddenly right in front of her. He turns onto a dirt path toward the shape of something, a building of some sort, a cabin maybe. Her teeth chatter harder as she turns her car around as quickly and quietly as she can. It feels awful backing up into total darkness. She could be in the middle of outer space for as much as she can see in any direction, left, right, up, down.
Outside the driver-side window, a beam of light wobbles across a broken-down A-frame cabin with peeling yellow paint and a tangle of birds’ nests in its eaves. It’s Mark moving around with a flashlight. The car points in the right direction now, but Cass’s foot hesitates above the gas pedal. The quivering light comes to rest on a patch of forest floor. Mark gets down on his knees. The light from a camping lantern grows around him.
Now he’s up on his feet. He scurries back and forth from the A-frame to the circle of light. She waits for him to turn in the direction of her car, to notice her watching him through the window, but he doesn’t. He carries the shapes of things in his arms. His head is down, focused on his task. He screws together tent poles and tamps them into the ground. He tugs blue fabric, shiny with moisture, over the top. He takes the lantern by its handle and stoops to crawl inside.
Then he pauses, turns, and squints toward the road. He lifts the lantern above his head. His face is filthy, streaked with mud. His clothes are torn and ragged.
He takes a step toward her car, the lantern still in his outstretched hand, and another step, and she panics, pressing her foot down hard on the gas. The car lunges forward, away from Mark, and Leah hiccups awake. Cass speeds down the mountain, through the tunnels of pine trees, through the thick fog. Leah’s face is pink and annoyed in the mirror: she shrieks, hiccups, and shrieks again.
The road winds tightly to the right. Then the left, until they’ve nearly reache
d the bottom. “Shhh, shhhh. Shhh, shhhh,” Cass says, until her own skipping heartbeat slows.
The road straightens out, but the fog doesn’t clear. It’s descended down the mountain and into the valley. She turns onto the westbound highway and joins the traffic moving slowly through the murky air. She weaves around cars, and finally breaks through the haze. Leah’s crying slows. Cass rounds the mountain, the fog a white cloud trailing behind her. Clearing is up ahead, a cluster of bright lights in a sea of dark green.
The image of Mark’s dirty face surfaces in her mind. She shivers when she recalls his scurrying, jerky movements. She recognized something in his darting, wild eyes. Something she felt in the last minutes of Leah’s birth, when she pushed her out of her body and it seemed like she would be split in two—that she feels when Leah wails and her cries seem to come from inside Cass’s own skin.
EIGHT
FROM THE LIVING room window Ginny watches Mark and Noah drive off into the soupy fog that appeared overnight. It feels odd being at home by herself—it’s such a rarity. Three turkeys emerge from the gloom. They strut across the cul-de-sac, and their beaks nudge the air. One of the cats is stalking them from the Mehtas’ bushes. Ginny sets down her coffee and calls out the front door, “Pinky!” She walks outside and the turkeys scatter.
Ashmina’s daughter comes out of her house and squints through the haze.
Ginny regrets coming outside now. Seeing Samara brings her back to the morning Ashmina died, to the fluorescent lights of the operating room and the beeping warnings of the monitors.
“Hi. I was trying to find our cat,” Ginny says. Samara’s taller than Ginny in her heeled boots. She always forgets how old she is; still thinks of her as the teenager who babysat Noah a few times, on a rare Friday night when Ginny wasn’t on call. But she must be twenty-four or twenty-five now.
“How’s your dad?”
“He’s all right.” She keeps looking past Ginny, at a spot on her front lawn. But nothing’s there. Just bright, wet grass.
“Everything okay?”
“Yeah.” Samara walks toward her car, still staring at the same spot. “I’ve got to go—”
“You’ll let us know if you need anything.” She wants to say something more. Something like, I miss her too. But it doesn’t feel right.
“Okay.” Samara climbs into her car.
It occurs to Ginny that Samara’s angry with her. She watches her drive away. Her face is serious behind the wheel of her small Honda. Ginny waves but Samara doesn’t wave back.
Ginny stays on her front porch after she’s gone and replays Ashmina’s surgery in her mind again, step by step. She’s done this hundreds of times, trying to figure out what she could have done differently. But she comes up with nothing, not a single thing.
She could talk to someone about it, a colleague, her husband. But she’s out of the habit. The first time one of her patients died she tried to talk to Mark. To explain what it felt like, how the decisions she made in the OR would gnaw at her. The second-guessing followed her everywhere—work, home, during a hot shower, during sex. But it was too much for him. He started asking her obsessively about her day, and his worry weighed her down more than her own. So she stopped talking to him about it at all.
The turkeys have disappeared into the haze, and Pinky jumps up onto the porch and rubs his back against the front door. She lets him inside, picks up her coffee, and starts toward the stairs. She takes a sip from her mug, and the coffee tastes terrible. The ground shakes, like it does sometimes. She hears Noah’s voice from the kitchen—
He must have left something behind. But that’s not right. Mark and Noah drove away ten minutes ago, and they haven’t come back. But that is Noah’s voice. She steps into the kitchen. Her son stands in the middle of the room with a Wiffle ball in his hand. He rolls the ball across the counter and his feet slide on the tile as he runs to catch it before it falls off the other end.
“What are you doing back?” she asks, but he doesn’t answer. As he grabs the ball, he bumps into another person, a woman who is small but solid-looking, with serious gray eyes. She wears a gray sweater exactly like the one that hangs, still wrapped in dry cleaner’s plastic, in Ginny’s closet. She is…Ginny’s mind works hard to compute what she is. Her replica, her twin. Except she’s softer, somehow, than the woman Ginny sees in the mirror every day. Her face is fuller, her hips rounder.
“Cereal or oatmeal?” the woman asks Noah. The fog is thick in the window behind her.
“Can I have toast with peanut butter?”
Ginny already knows what her twin will say: “Toast, coming right up for a hungry guy,” because these are the words she spoke to Noah just a few minutes ago.
Noah sits down at the kitchen table and gulps his milk. Ginny’s twin takes a plate from the cabinet and sets it down on the counter. She lays two pieces of bread in the toaster oven and presses the button to turn it on. She strokes Noah’s hair as she crosses the kitchen to get the peanut butter from the pantry, and he tilts his head to smile at her with ruddy cheeks. The toaster oven beeps. Ginny’s twin crunches a knife across the toasted bread, and the smell of peanut butter fills the room. When she sets the plate in front of Noah she kisses his forehead.
Like a video recording of her morning, everything she and Noah said and did is the same. Almost the same. All the same things happen, but there’s a feeling of warmth she doesn’t recall. A sense of affection between her and her son that reminds her of when Noah was younger, when they would snuggle on the couch together and watch Sesame Street.
Ginny’s twin retrieves her jacket from its hook. Noah brings his empty plate to the sink and searches the ground for his sneakers. She knows what happened next, just a few minutes ago, when it was her and Noah in the kitchen. Noah sidled up to her and she took his head in her hands, looked into his gray-blue eyes, and thought, It won’t be long until you’re taller than me, and I’ll have to reach up to hug you. Then Mark’s footsteps sounded on the stairs. He and Noah shrugged on their coats and Ginny pulled out her phone to check her clinic schedule. Mark said, “See you later” to her and “Grab your soccer bag” to Noah. She was focused on her phone when Mark hastily pressed his lips to her temple.
Now the woman, her twin, and Noah stand together by the coat hooks. She has Noah’s head in her hands, just like Ginny did. “It won’t be long until you’re taller than me,” she says. “And I’ll have to reach up to hug you.”
“That’s because you’re so short,” Noah says, and they laugh.
Footsteps thump on the stairs. But it’s not Mark who appears. It’s Edith. Her hair is bright under the kitchen lights, her freckled face pink, like it’s just been freshly washed. In her hand she holds a mug with one of Noah’s baby pictures on it. She pauses at the sink to splash water into it, gestures to the window, and remarks on the fog.
Noah still can’t find his sneakers. He leaves the kitchen, and now the two women are alone by the coat hooks. They wait for Noah to return. Edith says something in a low tone to Ginny’s twin. They giggle and the laughter transforms her twin’s face. It’s her own short nose, her own slightly down-turned mouth, but enlivened and happy.
Her twin reaches for Edith’s hair, trapped underneath her jacket, and pulls it free. They lean close to each other and their noses almost touch. They smell like soap and sugar and coffee. Light bounces off their shiny faces.
Noah reappears, sneakers on, and Edith opens the door to the garage. She steps out of sight and Noah follows. Ginny’s twin is right behind. She’s nearly through the door. Ginny reaches out, and gasps when she feels the slippery fabric of her twin’s sleeve. The woman looks behind her, confused. She pulls her arm away and the material slips from Ginny’s fingers. Her twin’s eyes search the air for a moment. She smooths her sleeve. Then she snaps off the light.
* * *
—
A dense fog
floats outside The Great Outdoors Store, a squat gray building near the entrance to the highway. Mark’s driven by hundreds of times but has never been inside. He parks the Jeep, and makes his way through the mist. Inside is a dimly lit, cavernous warehouse. He thrusts his hands into his pockets as he follows a brown-carpeted aisle. The store is warm, especially for such a large space, and smells of citronella and WD-40. A simulated birdcall sounds out from somewhere. He doesn’t know why he’s here, not exactly. All he knows is the Other Mark’s dirty face propelled him here.
Above his head tents hang like bulging stalactites, gray and dark green and camouflage. To his right, a wall of guns seems to stretch for miles. Rifles stand at attention, secured to the wall. Glossy handguns lay still in glass cases. A revolving carousel—the kind Mark has seen in diners, full of pies and cakes—contains a collection of hunting knives.
Although the parking lot was deserted, at least eight people mill around. Do they all work here? He keeps his head down and avoids eye contact with the salesperson leaning on the gun counter, a man with thick black eyebrows, who wears what appears to be an orange prison jumpsuit. Mark can feel the man’s gaze. He shuffles into an aisle of camping lanterns and pretends to inspect one that’s solar powered.
The next row is marked HOME SECURITY, and he steps in that direction. Door and window locks, alarms, security lights, and signs that say BEWARE OF DOG and SMILE, YOU ARE ON CAMERA fill the shelves. He picks up an emergency ladder, and it unfolds with a clatter that echoes across the store. He hurriedly tries to fold it back up, but the metal rungs slide out of his hands and unfold even farther.
A sign on the floor spells something out with crooked adhesive letters: ARE YOU PROTECTED? But Mark misreads it, thinking it says: ARE YOU A PROTECTOR? An image surfaces in his mind, of him and Ginny fifteen years ago, huddled against a tree, when they set out on a day hike in the Tongass National Forest, got lost, and spent a paralyzingly cold night cowering in the root system of an old-growth hemlock tree. They planned to walk for just a few hours and brought only a backpack with a couple of granola bars and a single bottle of water.
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