In the mirror Leah’s mouth purses a few times and then is still. How long did it take to get to the dirt road Mark turned onto that night? It felt like forever. But it’s already up ahead, forking off to the right. She slows the car, parks, gets out, and locks Leah inside. The air is cold and clear, not sodden like it’s been for weeks, but crisp. Birds warble and flap their wings from the trees.
She walks to the spot where she saw Mark, toward a broken-down, A-frame cabin with peeling yellow paint and birds’ nests in its eaves. She remembers that night, how desperate she was when Leah wouldn’t stop crying, how trapped she felt, how she would have done almost anything to escape the sound of her screams. She pictures Mark’s dirty, terrified face. But who looked worse—more desperate, more scared, more wild? Mark or her?
Something’s moving ahead of her. Strange! Frogs—hundreds of them packed together—advance through the pines. A jostling sea of popping eyes and springy legs, they seem to move together and then separately, to transform in shape. One minute they’re an irregular oval, the next, a bobbing rectangle. Their edges look like appendages, their center a cascading wave. They move at a jolting, asymmetrical pace, and soon they disappear into the trees.
In their wake is a twist of blue fabric. A crumpled tent. And something else. What is it?
A shape on the ground. A human shape. It’s him. Her neighbor Mark. His forehead’s bloody. Oh god, is he—
A faint groan comes from his slumped form. Cass crouches over him. “What’s happened?”
His face is bewildered, his green eyes unfocused. Then he seems to recognize her.
“Can you stand up?”
He raises his head. Dirt and twigs cling to his dark hair. He tries to sit up, groans, and collapses again.
“Let me help you.” She pulls him up. “Hold on to me. My car is close.” But he’s so heavy. His wet clothes hang off his body; he smells of pine needles and sour skin. She tries again and she’s able to pull him to his feet. He leans on her, hard, and she helps him limp to her car.
When they get there his face has turned gray. He leans against a tree. “You should go.” This is the first thing he says. “There’s nowhere for you to take me. I’m better off here.”
“We’re going to the hospital. Get in.” She holds open the passenger-side door. Leah’s still asleep in the backseat. She hears the squeak of her breathing.
He climbs into the car, finally, and they drive down the mountain. He slumps in his seat, and grimaces at all the turns. Cass wants to ask him, Have you been living in the woods this whole time? She wants to ask him, Why? But he’s so silent and pale—he’s pressed his bloody forehead against the glass—that she says nothing.
When they get to the hospital, she helps him out of the car. She supports him with one hand and lugs the car seat with the other. They pause inside the sliding glass doors. Again she remembers standing in this spot with Amar the morning after Leah was born, the sun bright in their eyes.
She asks Mark, “What happened in the woods?”
He turns and there’s a wild look in his eyes. “He tried to kill me.”
“What? Who?”
“A man”—he touches his bloody forehead—“who looked just like me.” His face turns almost white as he slumps against Cass.
A nurse in pink scrubs waves at them from behind the front desk. “Sir, are you feeling dizzy?”
“Page Dr. McDonnell,” Cass tells her. “Her husband’s hurt.” But Mark shakes his head. “No.” He looks like he wants to run, but he’s barely able to stand. “Not her.”
The nurse hurries toward them and steadies Mark. “Is there someone else we can call?”
Leah makes a snuffling sound from her car seat, and Mark watches her eyes flutter and then close. “Noah,” he says. “I want to see my son.”
* * *
—
Across the parking lot the hospital doors flash silver and blue. Samara walked through the doors dozens of times with her mom, coming and going from appointments and treatments. But she hasn’t been back since Ashmina died. She gathers the papers she needs to present the offer on the Kells house. Professor Kells’s sons are with their father inside.
It’s not raining for once. It’s cool and clear. But when she steps inside the smell of the cafeteria churns her stomach. She remembers the awful morning she and her dad walked through the hospital in stunned slow motion. It felt as if her body was moving through glue. The colors of things weren’t right. The air was full of a heavy smell, coffee beans and cleaning supplies. A man in a white coat walked past with a tray laden with orange eggs and gray toast, and she wanted to knock it out of his hands.
The wave of nausea passes. A nurse in pink scrubs wheels an elderly woman toward the front doors. A doctor hurries past holding a large coffee and a protein bar. Her face is skinny and tired.
When Samara gets to Room 507 she pauses. Through the open door two men are next to a gray-haired patient sitting up in a hospital bed. Their resemblance is unmistakable, a father and his two sons. One son reads aloud from a newspaper and the other leans back in his chair, listening. The gray-haired man’s eyes droop; he’s falling into a doze.
She has stuck yellow SIGN HERE tabs to the contracts, under where her clients wrote their names. She hesitates.
The man with the newspaper notices her and waves her inside.
“I’ll be right there,” she says, and ducks into an adjacent empty room. She pulls out a blank contract and sets it on the bed. With trembling fingers she writes a number five thousand dollars higher than her clients’ offer. It feels rash, irresponsible. It feels like she might regret it. But she scribbles her name at the bottom of each page anyway.
THIRTY-ONE
NOAH’S EYES START to droop halfway into the movie they’re watching in his room, and Ginny nudges him awake. “Let’s go brush your teeth and take your pain pill. Then you can sleep.”
“It’s still light out.”
“It’s almost seven and you need your rest.” She helps him up from the bed, the splint on his shoulder and upper arm unwieldy.
His brow creases. “It’s starting to hurt again.”
She puts her hand on his other shoulder and steers him toward the bathroom, runs some water into a glass, and hands him his pill. “Take this.” She puts some toothpaste on his toothbrush and gives it to him, but it’s clumsy in his left hand.
“Here, I’ll help you,” she says gently. She stands behind him, like she used to when he was three or four, before he was able to brush his teeth on his own. Watching herself in the mirror, she moves the toothbrush over his front teeth, and around his bottom and top molars.
As he rinses his mouth and spits into the sink, she appraises his face: he’s pale and bits of mud still cling to his hair. His splint will be on for eight weeks. But he’s going to be okay. She picks some dirt from his hair. “Come on, I’ll tuck you in.”
Back in his room she turns off the movie and helps him into bed. She pulls the covers up, brushes his hair from his forehead, and sits on the edge of the bed. He turns this way and that, trying to find a comfortable position with the bulky splint, and then his eyes slowly close.
She’s spent the whole day in this room. At first they didn’t talk about the accident, but then, while they played cards, she asked him how he got hurt. How exactly. But every time she asks he says the same thing: It was an accident. It was bad luck. It wasn’t Dad’s fault.
Mark has taken full responsibility for Noah’s injury. But to Ginny’s astonishment, this hasn’t dampened his zeal for finishing his shelter. Once they brought Noah home from the hospital and settled him in his own bed, Mark disappeared into the backyard and she hasn’t seen him since.
She watches her son’s eyelids flutter. Something has to change. But it’s not what she thought. She’s been so stupid, so focused on the wrong things. It’s obvious
, now that she’s spent the day in Noah’s company, and remembered how good it feels to be with him for long stretches of time. Doing very little, just being together. When he was born she was just out of residency. She missed a lot. But she thought there would be time, later, to take it all in: his natural sweetness at three years old, his innate curiosity at five, all the things he could do at seven and eight. But too many of those years are a blur. She kept telling herself, I’ll have more time, later. She would say, We’ll be together more in the summer. But the years have hustled past, and now it feels like she only saw the highs and the lows. None of the long stretches in between.
She lies down next to Noah, his cheek warm and soft next to hers, his breathing deep and steady. His hair smells like dried earth and something else sweet and sharp, like crushed flowers. He’s smelled like that ever since he was born. When he was a baby she would press her nose to his head, over and over, like it was a drug, like she couldn’t get enough.
She thinks of Mark out in the wet yard, digging in the dirt with the noisy backhoe, and of Edith the last time she saw her, in the call room with the sheet pulled up to her chin. She’s not very good at it—loving, and being loved.
Noah got the best of her, and even that wasn’t all that great. He’s eleven years old. He won’t sleep in this room forever. “I’m sorry,” she whispers near his ear. “I’m sorry, Noah.” She says this to him, but it feels like she’s saying it to herself.
When her phone buzzes she gets up from the bed as quietly as she can. Edith’s name flashes across the screen, and she takes the phone downstairs. Livi’s still here. She came over earlier to visit Noah, but Ginny thought Mark had already taken her home. She’s watching TV in the living room.
Ginny ducks into the kitchen and answers. Edith starts talking right away. “Your son, how is he?” Her voice sounds different, thin and strained.
“He has a fractured humerus. But he’ll be okay.”
There’s silence on the other end of the line, and Ginny can hear Edith breathing. Finally she says, “I can’t stop thinking about what happened.”
“I really can’t talk now.”
“Is Mark there?”
“I think so.”
“I need to talk to you,” Edith says. “Just for a few minutes.”
Ginny looks out the window into the dark backyard. Mark is moving around with a flashlight out there. “I can’t leave the house.”
“That’s okay. I’ll come to you.”
* * *
—
Mark swings the hatch door to the shelter back and forth to test its hinges. Rain mists his face. The ground beneath his boots is slippery with mud, but the earth surrounding the shelter is solid and sure. Like a gray fox’s hole or a bobcat’s natal den. He climbs inside and shuts the door tightly behind him. The sounds of the forest—the humming of insects and the clicking of frogs—disappear.
He pauses in the dark to take off his boots. The room smells like new cement and the rubber sealant he applied to the walls a few hours ago. In his socks he feels along a set of shelves for a camping lantern, turns it on, and moves around the rectangular room in its yellow light. He smooths the fleece covers on the three cots, moving methodically from one to the next. He lines up objects on the shelves: cans of soup and boxes of powdered milk and containers of instant oatmeal; extra bedding and towels; a first-aid kit and an emergency radio and two shovels; a length of rope and rolls of plastic sheeting. He checks the pump on the air filter and tests the generator. He opens the lid of the chemical toilet and closes it. With each object Mark touches, he feels more solid and singular. With each object, the Other Mark feels less real—more like a ghost or a shade than a man.
* * *
—
Downstairs, Ginny pulls on her sneakers. She hears Mark come in through the back door, take off his boots, and climb the stairs. She calls up to him, “I’m going out. Stay with Noah will you?”
He doesn’t ask her why. He just calls back, “Okay.”
Outside the air is damp and cool, the mountain hazy with fog. It takes a minute for Ginny’s eyes to adjust—her neighbors’ windows and doors are dark—before she realizes she’s not alone. Across the cul-de-sac Samara sits on a lawn chair in her front yard, fast asleep.
Ginny hesitates. The last time she saw Samara she was so angry. But she doesn’t look angry now. Her face is peaceful despite the awkward position of her body in the chair, with one foot tucked underneath her and the other resting on the grass. It reminds her of the morning of her mother’s surgery. When Ginny came into Ashmina’s room it was early, before six, and Samara was asleep in a chair next to her mother’s bed. Her parents were talking in low voices. Ginny said they needed to discuss the surgery and asked if they should wake Samara. But Ashmina waved Manish away when he moved to rouse her. “Leave her be,” Ashmina said. “I like watching her sleeping face.”
Ginny crosses the wet circle of pavement between the houses. She bends down to shake Samara’s arm, whose eyes blink open. “What are you doing out here?” Ginny asks. “Is everything okay?”
“I’m waiting for her.”
“Waiting for who?”
Samara rubs her eyes and sits up straighter in her chair. “I saw her. I saw my mom right there.” She points to a spot in the grass.
Ginny shakes her head. “I don’t understand—”
“She left me this money,” Samara says. “But she didn’t tell me what she wanted me to do with it.”
Ginny looks at the spot Samara pointed to. “Maybe she thought you should decide for yourself.” She remembers rolling Ashmina to the OR on the morning of her surgery. She was trying to complete the presurgery checklist, but Ashmina wasn’t listening. She was talking about how, when Samara was a little girl, she used to hide behind Ashmina’s legs whenever someone came to the door. “Manish said I babied her. But she was such a little thing. So small, so timid.” The anesthesiologist started sedation and Ashmina’s eyes began to droop and her words slur. Ginny bent close to hear what she was saying, but all she could make out was “like a little bird.”
“I wish I could talk to her, just one more time,” Samara says.
“Me too.”
“Really?” Samara shivers and rubs her shoulders. “What would you ask her?”
“I’d ask if she’s angry with me.”
“My dad says she knew the surgery was risky with her heart,” Samara says.
“She told me, ‘I’m not done. I have stuff to do. So let’s go for it.’ ”
Samara’s quiet for a minute. A misty rain begins to fall. “For a long time I thought it was your fault she died. My dad says it wasn’t. He says it was nobody’s fault.”
Ginny has played Ashmina’s surgery over and over again in her mind. She’s tried to find something, any small detail that could have changed the outcome. But she’s never found it. “I wish it had gone differently. But it didn’t.”
“I bought a house. That’s what I would tell her if she were here.” Samara folds up her chair and gazes, again, at the spot in the wet grass. “Maybe it was a mistake. I guess I’ll find out.”
Samara shrugs and the gesture reminds Ginny of when she was younger, when it felt like she didn’t know what she was doing. When every decision seemed huge. But back then she had Mark. They chose this cul-de-sac together, equidistant to the university and the hospital. This semicircle of pine trees. This house they brought Noah home to when he was born.
“Why are you out here?” Samara asks.
Ginny rubs her hands over her face. “I’m leaving my husband.” It feels strange to say it out loud.
“Wow, I’m sorry.”
“Things happen,” Ginny says. But maybe that isn’t right. She made choices and they led her here. Now she doesn’t know what’s next, and Mark isn’t going to be by her side this time. “But it will be okay. I hop
e.”
THIRTY-TWO
ONCE SAMARA HAS gone back into her house, Ginny sits on the curb and waits for Edith. Finally her car appears on the dark hillside. She parks just outside the cul-de-sac, gets out, and walks toward Ginny, a bundle of yellow asters in her hands.
“What are those for?”
“I picked them from my yard. They’re for Noah.”
“I can’t give Noah flowers from you.”
“Right.” Edith looks down at the spiky blooms. “I mean, I know that. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
Edith peers into Ginny’s backyard. “Is this where it happened?”
“Yeah.”
“Can I see?”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I just want to.”
But Ginny has trouble finding her way, and sees only dark earth and tangled roots where the shelter used to be. Mark has buried the entire structure. She feels along the wet hillside until her hand finds something hard, the metal edges of the rounded hatch door. “It’s here. They were laying the support beams for the roof and one of them hit Noah.”
Edith squints at the door. “What’s inside?”
Ginny shakes her head. “I don’t know.”
* * *
—
Samara carries the folding chair through the wet grass and around the side of the house. She frowns. It’s so quiet. Almost no sound comes from the forest; the air is empty of woodpecker taps, cricket creaks. She returns the folding chair to its spot on the patio and opens the sliding glass door. The ground vibrates and she stubs her toe. There’s a terrible taste on her tongue.
She knows she left the light on. She feels around for the switch, and—she’s walked into the wrong house. The room she’s standing in is completely empty, of furniture, books, paintings, framed photographs, pillows, magazines, ceramic figurines. But it is her house. There’s the mantel her dad built when she was a little girl. There’s the arched doorway to the yellow kitchen—
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