Samara steps in front of them and shuts the door. Dog hair flies through the air, and she coughs and laughs. She sits with her back to the door and the dogs lick her face.
This room’s not renovated like the rest of the house. The sink is seventies yellow; the shower tile is brown-and-white and smells faintly of mildew. A pile of old towels sits on the back of the toilet.
The bathtub fills, and the dogs quiet. Their ears turn down and they side-eye the water. Steam fills the air.
“You’re going to put them both in there at once?”
“No, one at a time. But they try to hide when the other’s getting bathed, so I started trapping them in here together.”
He pats the side of the tub. “Come on, Maple.” She turns around in a circle, and then tries to nudge Samara away from the door with her nose.
“Nice try,” Samara says. “Go on.”
Maple makes a little skip toward the tub, stops, turns around again.
“It’s a long process.” Shawn laughs. “Come on, girl—”
She jumps in and stands in the few inches of water, looking miserable while Shawn sprays her down.
“Should I wash?” Samara asks.
He hands her the shampoo.
She moves closer to the tub and Maple wags her tail, but only a little. The dog’s breath is hot against Samara’s face as she lathers Maple’s coat, working the mud out from under her legs and chest, and in between the pads of her paws. The smell of soap and wet dog fills the room.
Once both dogs have been washed and released from the bathroom, they dash wildly through the house. Shawn runs after them with a towel but eventually gives up.
“It’s late,” he says. “Do you want to stay?”
Both of their shirts are splattered with water, their fingers pruney.
“Do you want me to?”
“Up to you.”
“Then, yes.”
The dogs are shaking themselves and rolling around on the carpet in Shawn’s bedroom. They try to jump up on the bed, but he shoos them off.
He offers her a T-shirt and she peels off her wet shirt and jeans. He gets two beers from the kitchen, and they lie on his bed.
“That day at the house,” Samara says. “I was acting weird.”
“You were.”
“I’ve been…preoccupied.”
“I remember what it was like.” He takes a sip of his beer.
“When your mom died.”
“Yeah.”
She remembers from high school. Breast cancer. His sister missed two months of school. Samara brought books and worksheets from their teachers to her front door. But she wasn’t invited inside. She’s ashamed to admit she hasn’t thought about it since, even after she and Shawn started seeing each other. Even after her own mom died.
Maple has settled herself on the floor. Ruff stands at the side of the bed and wags his tail.
“I’ve never asked you about your mom. I should have…”
Ruff sets his head on the covers near Shawn’s pillow. “I used to wish her back,” he says softly. “I’d picture her in my room at night. She would sit on the edge of the bed watching me. Sometimes she’d brush my hair from my face.” He motions, and his voice trails off.
“I’m sorry, Shawn.”
He pats the bed and Ruff jumps up, wedges himself between them. His fur is still damp. He pushes his wet nose into Samara’s hand.
Shawn strokes the top of his head. “Could be worse. You’ve got your dad. I’ve got mine.”
They sit back and drink their beers in silence for a while. The window’s cracked open, and a cool breeze ruffles the dog’s tail.
Shawn nudges Ruff. “Back to your bed.”
The dog reluctantly gets down, looks back at them with mournful eyes.
“Which is his?”
“The blue one.” Shawn turns off the light and they get under the covers. “I tried taking Ladybird’s bed away. But they like sleeping on it. So I kept it there.”
He puts his arms around her. Maple is snoring now.
“What have you decided?” His voice is low and sleepy in the dark. “Are you going to stay or go?”
“Stay.” As soon as she says it she knows it’s true. She doesn’t actually want to go back to Seattle. She likes her job, even though she never planned to do it for more than a few months, even though she’s not as good at it as her mom was. “But I’m going to have to find a place to live.”
He laughs. “Don’t want to keeping living with your dad?”
“He’s selling the house, he’s going on an adventure—”
“Good for him.”
She sighs. “It is good, for him.” She tucks her head between Shawn’s arm and his chest. Heat radiates from his skin. “Maybe it’ll be good for me too.”
TWENTY-ONE
SATURDAY MORNING MARK and Noah drive north to buy a hand crank for the shelter’s air filtration system. The late morning sun flickers across the windshield of the Jeep; ahead the mountain hides behind shifting, white clouds. Mark’s thumb crawls around on the steering wheel. He needs the back-ordered crank to finish the bunker. Picturing it completed in his backyard is the only thing keeping him sane, the only thing keeping the Other Mark’s constant questions at bay. When he called The Great Outdoors, Lee said his uncle, Harry, might have an extra. He isn’t sure what he’s getting into, and getting Noah into, driving to Lee’s uncle’s house—which Lee called a compound—in the middle of nowhere with three hundred dollars inside his jacket pocket to pay for the part. At least he convinced Noah it wasn’t a good idea to pick Livi up on the way.
He turns onto the highway, going east, and follows the directions written on a note stuck to the dashboard of the Jeep. The sun disappears as they turn onto an exit ramp marked with a state forest sign, and then wind up and around Broken Mountain on a service road. Moss-covered pines and firs crowd the road on both sides. He thinks of the Other Mark and imagines his dirty face hovering, supersized, on the horizon. His mouth opens and closes, mouthing the words What’s going to happen, Mark, what? What? What?
Noah pauses his handheld video game. “Where are we?” In the rearview mirror his cheeks are smooth and pink. He’s wearing his soccer uniform, a blue nylon shirt and loose-fitting black shorts. He’s such a solid, healthy kid. It comforts Mark, looking at him.
“On the other side of the mountain. Can you help me find this left? There’s a mile marker, 23, just before the turn.” He passes Noah the note from the dashboard.
The trees grow dense and dark around them as the road climbs. Noah is quiet for a while, and then he asks, “So…does Mom think you’re nuts?”
“Why, you worried your old man’s going crazy?” It doesn’t occur to him until he says it that this could be true.
Noah appraises his dad, and Mark tries for a casual expression. “I guess not,” he decides.
The road climbs farther.
“There,” Noah points. “That sign says 23.” Around the next bend, nearly hidden by blackberry brambles, a dirt and gravel path forks to the left. There’s no route or street marker, only a large PRIVATE PROPERTY sign nailed to a cedar tree.
Mark slows the Jeep. He hesitates. He cranes his neck; the road is only wide enough for one car.
“What has your mother said? About me?” He suddenly wants to know.
Noah looks at his dad and at the road behind them. “We’re in the middle of the street.”
“Just tell me what she said.”
“She doesn’t want me working on the shelter.” Noah lowers his eyes and kicks the back of the seat. “She says it isn’t appropriate.”
Mark imagines his wife’s supersized face joining the Other Mark’s on the horizon. His wife’s lips are pressed together. She shakes her head. “Do me a favor and don’t talk to your mom about the shelter.�
� He turns onto the gravel road. “If she asks, tell her to talk to me.”
They creep along the road through a tunnel of flame-colored tamaracks and bushy grand firs, and Mark watches for mule deer or wild turkeys that might cross their path. Gravel pops under the Jeep’s tires. The road doesn’t widen. If another car comes from the other direction, they’ll be at a stalemate. There’s no place to go but forward. More PRIVATE PROPERTY signs appear, one every few trees. A few are nailed to the sides of Oregon ashes, and this annoys Mark. One of the signs has a few holes in it. They look like bullet holes, but he doesn’t point them out to Noah.
“This place is creepy.” Noah peers out the window.
“It is.” Mark pictures his wife’s disapproving face, now under the gold tamaracks. He ignores it. Eventually a metal gate, the kind used to keep horses in their pasture, appears, blocking the road. Over it someone has draped a large yellow flag with a black, coiled snake and the phrase DON’T TREAD ON ME. To one side of the gate is a realtor’s yard sign, spray-painted white and stenciled in large green letters:
YOU ARE ENTERING
THE SOVEREIGN REPUBLIC OF
STAY THE FUCK OFF MY LAND
Noah turns to Mark. “Wow, Dad.”
He knows this is the moment to figure out how to turn the Jeep around and drive home. But he needs that crank. He pads his thumb against the steering wheel. “We’ll be fine.” He puts the Jeep in park and turns off the ignition. The car rocks on its tires for a moment and then goes still.
Noah reads from the sticky note. “Untie gate.”
Sure enough, a thick rope secures the gate to a towering western red cedar. Mark gets out of the car. “Wait here.”
“No way, Dad. I want to see.”
“I mean it. Wait here.”
Mark tries to untie it, but it’s harder than it looks. He tugs it this way and that. This is ridiculous. There must be a way to…He digs his fingers into the tight loops. Well, hell. He stands back and surveys the length of the rope.
The car door squeaks open and Noah comes to stand next to him. “Why don’t we just leave the Jeep, hop the gate, and walk in?”
The fearlessness of his son irritates Mark, and also makes him proud. “No. We’re not doing that.”
“Why not?”
“Because we just aren’t.”
“But we need that thing, right? The crank thing. For the shelter.”
Mark takes one of the loose ends of the knot. “Let me just figure this out.”
There’s no way he’s going to reverse the Jeep all the way back to the main road because he can’t untie this fucking knot. He twists with the grain of the rope’s fibers, and pulls hard at the knot’s loops. He puts his whole body weight behind it. His feet are hot inside his hiking boots, and he starts to sweat. He’s pulling so hard he slips on the damp ground, falling hard in the mud.
Noah erupts into laughter. Then he stops. “Dad, are you okay?”
Mark gets up and brushes dirt and twigs from his pants. “Very funny. I fell on my ass.” Then, “Don’t repeat that.”
“What, the word ass?”
“Yeah. Don’t repeat it.”
“Okay, Dad.”
Mark goes back to twisting and pulling the rope. Noah stands nearby and watches him.
“Noah, seriously. Go find something else to do.”
Noah walks around the Jeep a few times. He grabs the gate and shakes it, and the DON’T TREAD ON ME flag ripples and flaps against the metal. “We can jump this, easy,” he says.
“Can you go stand by the car?” Mark keeps working at the knot. He gains a quarter of an inch, then a half an inch. A bird warbles from a nearby tree. “Hear that, Noah?” He tries to draw his son’s attention from the gate. “That’s a chestnut-backed chickadee. Never hear those in town.”
Noah puts his foot on the gate and tests his weight.
“Hear it? The tsee-dee, tsee-dee?”
The knot finally gives way, and the gate groans as Mark opens it. He congratulates himself. He fucking did it.
Noah looks disappointed.
Mark takes off his glasses and wipes his face with his shirtsleeve. “Come on, back in the car.”
They drive until they see a group of structures, all painted a shade of dark green that uncannily matches the surrounding trees: a farmhouse, a trailer, a barn, and a couple of outbuildings.
They get out of the car slowly. The matte green paint is even stranger up close—the color of a green maple leaf without its shine. Everything in view is painted, the house’s porch and stairs, its mailbox. The trailer and the barn and the chicken coop, all the same. “This place is weird,” Noah says.
A pickup truck is parked in front of the trailer. No, not a pickup. A sort of disassembled pickup. The back of the cab is open, revealing two headrests covered in a dark camouflage print. On the roll bar is a black-and-white sticker that says GET READY.
Mark tells Noah to stay in the driveway, and he climbs the farmhouse steps. He knocks on the door and listens. It’s very quiet. He hears only the sound of the wind in the trees, the creak of insects. He wishes it wasn’t so quiet. He knocks again, and Noah starts toward the trailer. Mark tells him to wait.
He catches up to his son. Blackout curtains darken the trailer’s windows and an X of duct tape covers the doorbell. Mark knocks and Noah hovers behind him. Again there’s no answer. Mark peers in the windows, feeling stupid and, he has to admit, scared. He puts his hand on his son’s shoulder and they walk around the back of the trailer. Beyond the small yard the shadowy forest looms, dense with moss-covered pines and firs. A strange scent he can’t place fills the air, damp and flowery.
It’s already past the time Mark agreed to meet Harry. He doesn’t know what to do.
“It smells like something,” Noah says.
Mark peers into the woods. “Yeah, I know.”
Noah climbs a pile of firewood, jumps off it, and then wanders toward the trees.
“Noah, hold up,” Mark calls. “We’re going to wait here.”
But his son has disappeared behind a cedar tree. “Dad, there’s smoke.”
“What do you mean?” Mark sniffs the air. “Where?”
Noah’s right. Between two western red cedars a column of smoke seems to rise from the ground itself. When he reaches his son, Noah’s bent over a sort of exhaust pipe coming up from the ground. One of Noah’s eyes squints shut as he looks down the pipe.
But it’s not smoke coming from the ground; it’s steam. Mark gets down on his hands and knees, flattening the wood sorrel that surrounds the pipe. He peers down the dark metal tube, one-eyed, like Noah did, and gets a nose full of moist, sweet-smelling air. There’s a sound, a metallic backbeat, tun tunt, tun tunt, that reminds him of something.
“Laundry,” Noah says. “It smells like laundry.”
Mark sits up and wipes his fogged glasses. There’s a bunker right under their feet. He’s sure of it.
“Hello?” Mark says, tentatively, into the pipe.
“Is there someone down there?” Noah asks. He bends over the pipe again and the tops of their heads touch. “In the ground?”
Mark sees his own excitement reflected back in his son’s face. They yell into the pipe together and it feels thrilling and ridiculous. “Helllooooooo!”
A muffled voice answers. “Yeah?”
Mark calls back. “It’s Mark.”
“Who?”
“I’m here about the hand crank.”
“About what?”
Mark bends closer to the tube, his lips brushing its cold metal grate, and yells again. “The crank!”
There’s a pause. Then: “Door’s open.”
They’re going to see inside a bunker. A real one. But where’s the door? They walk farther into the woods and search the ground. This time Noah doesn�
��t run ahead. He stays beside his dad as they weave around thick tree trunks and tangled blackberry bushes. The pines and firs grow dense and the light turns dusky. A small yellow marker indicates they’ve now entered the state forest. Surely they’ve gone too far.
Mark is about to tell Noah they must have missed the door when his mouth goes dry and tinny, and the earth shudders under his feet. He reaches for his son.
“What the heck was that?” Noah says.
Mark squints between the trees—
About thirty or forty feet ahead, a campfire burns in a small clearing in the brush. A dark-haired man crouches over it. The Other Mark.
“Dad, why did the ground shake like that?”
Mark pulls his son back the way they came, his legs trembling and his boots clumsy on the uneven ground. Blackberry branches scratch his arms and pull at the fabric of his pants, but he doesn’t stop until they’ve reached the pipe. “Stay here,” he says.
Noah protests. “What’s going on?”
“Everything’s going to be fine.” Mark swats a bramble from his elbow. “Just stay in this exact spot.” He points at the pipe and charges back into the brush.
He barrels through the forest. He stomps over a disintegrating log. His shoulders snap the branches of fir trees. He’s had enough. The clearing is up ahead.
The Other Mark’s still there, sitting cross-legged in front of the fire, about forty feet away. He leans over a heap of smoldering twigs and the firelight illuminates his mud-streaked face. A broken-down A-frame cabin with peeling yellow paint stands nearby, nearly hidden in the trees.
Mark holds up his fist. “Hey.” His voice is more breath than sound. “Hey, you.” He trips over a root and his hand scrapes the furrowed side of a cedar tree. “You.” He can’t bring himself to call out his own name.
Nothing happens. The Other Mark’s expression doesn’t change.
Mark starts to run. “What do you want?” He pumps his arms. His voice is louder: “Tell me what you want. Tell me or go away!”
He’s only twenty feet away now, and he’s charging the Other Mark as fast as he can get footholds in the soft ground. He careens around one tree trunk and then another. Faster and faster. But there’s something uncanny about the trees surrounding the Other Mark, and the light too.
If, Then Page 15