by Ali Benjamin
Yes, here it is. The banter. The easy back-and-forth, maybe the only easy thing in his life these days.
“And you and Zo actually, like, chose to move here, huh?” Maddy asks. Hands deep in the pockets of her hoodie. Slow steps. She’s in no hurry, and neither is he.
“We sure did.”
“From…like…New York.”
“Brooklyn. Yeah.”
“And you did this because…?”
Fifteen years after he and Zo made the move, even he can’t fully recall the reasons why. It had something to do with the way New York felt in those years after 9/11—precarious, on a knife’s edge. All those police officers searching backpacks at the entrance of the subway stations, the briefcase-sniffing K-9s, the way every helicopter in the sky felt like an ominous warning. Besides, Bränd had moved west by then, and Ethan had placed a tiny diamond on Zo’s finger (handmade platinum band, purchased with cash at the Clay Pot on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope, back when the store sold at least a handful of clay pots). Moving to the Berkshires felt like clarity, sanity. Zo could make her films in peace, Ethan could write novels, maybe a screenplay or two. It was a chance to live a little more simply, I went to the woods to live deliberately and all that.
Now he tries to explain it to Maddy the only way he knows how: “Seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“Well,” Maddy answers. And this time there’s no laughter in her voice. “I definitely know that feeling.”
Ethan’s phone buzzes. Stops, then begins again, almost immediately.
Poorhouse.
Motherfucking apocalypse.
Ethan pulls the phone out of his pocket just long enough to glimpse the image of Randy that’s stored in his contacts: the silver-blond mane, just rumpled enough to look like he’s not trying too hard, the fake horn-rims, those perfect teeth. The smile of a man who has never doubted the world is his.
“Oooh, what’s that, an actual, like, phone call?” Maddy asks him. “Old-school.” Maddy hates the phone—or rather, hates talking on the phone. In truth, she uses her phone constantly, flipping at dizzying speed between her camera and texts and Instagram and Snapchat and Candy Crush and FaceTime and God-knows-what-else. But the one way she won’t use her phone is as an actual phone. It’s one of Zo’s biggest frustrations with her. The main reason Maddy’s here is to help out with Alex, Zo has complained on more than one occasion. But how are we supposed to leave our kid with someone who won’t pick up when I call?
“It’s an old buddy of mine,” Ethan tells Maddy. Then he adds, “Hollywood guy.” He feels the urge to say more. Not about the conversation he’d just had—not about balls-on-the-chopping-block and out-for-blood—but the better, more impressive stuff. He could explain that Randy’s kind of a big deal, actually, that his name appears regularly in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, and even, from time to time, Vanity Fair. He could tell her that he and Randy launched Bränd together, just the two of them, after college, and that it was exhilarating. That sometimes, even now, Ethan still lies awake at night, remembering how it all felt back in those heady New York days, when their whole lives still lay ahead, all doors open, nothing yet impossible.
But even if helping launch one of Hollywood’s most successful influence companies did happen to be the kind of thing that Maddy cared about, all she’d have to do is take a look around at Ethan’s life today. What about any of this—the dying town, the sour wife, the ADHD kid, the picking up dog shit on nighttime walks—is likely to impress her?
Maddy takes a deep breath, looks up at the trees. “Holy wow, that was some righteous flower. Arlo’s gonna make bank.”
Ethan has to piece together the meaning: righteous, flower, bank. “Wait. Arlo’s a…dealer?”
“Entrepreneur,” Maddy corrects. “You know Green Arts Wellness? That’s his.” Green Arts is a dispensary, or it’s trying to be anyway. Set halfway between Starkfield and Bettsbridge, it’s one of a gazillion Massachusetts businesses waiting for their recreational marijuana license. Any day now, the state will go the way of Colorado: all pot shops and open toking, hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue to be made, maybe more. That’s what they say, anyway, although years after legalizing weed, the state has yet to approve a single facility.
“Ohh, I see.” Ethan laughs. “That’s what you were doing with those guys down there. Market research.”
He’s teasing her, but damn: what he wouldn’t do for some of that righteous flower right about now.
“Dude, have you seen Green Arts? It’s like an Apple Store in there. That guy we were with tonight? He’s, like, a top cannabis consultant, and he says Arlo’s going to be rich as…wait, who’s that king?”
“Croesus?” Ethan frowns. He doesn’t care for this line of conversation. “Well, we’ll see. For the moment, Green Arts seems more like Schrödinger’s Dispensary.” Meaning, it’ll open or it won’t. Arlo will be rich as Croesus or he won’t.
Though, come to think of it, wasn’t the kid born rich as Croesus? Entrepreneur, my ass. Arlo’s just a greedy, spoiled-ass son of a guy who lucked out in the dot-com bubble and now has money to burn on the Next Big Thing.
Cripes, he wants to think about Arlo O’Shea as much as he wants to think about Randy. “Listen, how come you don’t have any girlfriends, anyway?” he asks Maddy.
“Why do you care?”
“I think you need some girlfriends, that’s all.”
“Okay, first of all,” Maddy says. “Why does it matter if my friends are girls, or guys, or both or neither? And second, do you happen to know a whole lot of girls my age who live in Starkfield, Massachusetts?”
To her first point, it does matter. It matters to him, anyway. And to her second, well, she’s probably right: it sometimes feels like he and Zo are the youngest people in this town, and they’re well into their mid-forties. “I’m going to find you some girlfriends,” he says.
The sound of gravel beneath their feet. And then Maddy’s voice, more hesitant now. “So…is Zo still pissed at me?”
There had been another misunderstanding. Zo had been certain that Maddy was supposed to pick up Alex at the end of the day. Maddy, though, swore they’d never had a conversation about it. Seething, Zo had thrust her phone toward Maddy, showing her the calendar entry: m. to pick up a. “I wouldn’t have added it to my calendar unless we had talked about it,” Zo had said. It had been too much, that phone-thrusting, and Ethan had found himself—not for the first time—siding with the person who wasn’t his wife. The truth is, Zo is almost certainly still pissed at Maddy, but Ethan does his best to reassure. “Oh, I’m sure she’s forgotten about it,” Ethan says. “Besides, she’s got her group over tonight.”
“All them witches. Right, I forgot.”
That’s what Zo’s women’s group calls themselves: All Them Witches. Twice a month for the past two years, sometimes more often, the witches have shown up at Ethan and Zo’s home (half of them wearing pink hats, all wearing their wrath like suits of armor) to make posters and write postcards and process the dumpster fire that is the news these days.
“Well, I know for a fact that Zo didn’t tell me to pick up Alex,” Maddy continues, and is it possible she’s leaning into Ethan now? Just a little bit? “If she had, I would have told her I couldn’t. I had…a call scheduled for that time. An important one.”
A call? Probably a job interview, which Ethan knows should be a good thing—there’s not much in Starkfield for someone Maddy’s age. But he doesn’t want to think about Maddy moving on, and even if he did, he almost certainly couldn’t find the words right now, because, yes: Maddy most definitely is leaning into him, and frankly, he’s starting to feel a little dizzy.
This. The feel of her arm against his. This is something new.
And then it is just their footsteps, and the rustle of leaves overhead, and a single
, late-season cricket. If it weren’t for the streetlights, or the occasional television flicker from otherwise-darkened homes, Ethan could almost convince himself they’re walking not just through space, but also backward, through time. Might as well be a hundred years ago.
“So, Mad…” he begins. He hasn’t any idea what’s about to come out of his mouth. He feels reckless, almost dangerous.
“Mmm?”
Finally, he says, “You shouldn’t take Zo personally. She’s just…stressed, that’s all.”
“Oh, I don’t take it personally,” Maddy says, voice bright. “When people get pissed at me, I try to be…just…like, whatever. You know?”
He smiles. Maybe that’s the advice he should give to Randy. Take it from a Millennial, Rand. Be, just, like, whatever.
* * *
—
Maddy came to Starkfield in June. It had been Zo’s idea. In college at Sarah Lawrence, Zo had worked at a coffee shop called Mornin’ Jo’s, run by a single mom, JoAnne Silver. The woman’s daughter, Madison, often hung out at the café after school; Zo sometimes helped her with homework. After graduation, Zo lost touch with the Silvers. But a few years ago, Madison—now in her twenties—found Zo on Facebook. In the intervening years, she’d shortened her name to Maddy, graduated high school, attended two years at the University of Denver, dropped out, lost her mom to ovarian cancer, then followed a dubious boyfriend to Leadville. There, she worked a series of part-time jobs, waitressing and bartending, as her relationship with Dubious Boyfriend became increasingly volatile. Early this spring, Maddy had posted to Facebook that the relationship was finally done for good. She was desperate for a new start—somewhere else, anywhere else—but had only a few hundred dollars to her name. Did anyone know of any opportunities, anywhere?
Zo had seen the post and gotten an idea: Maddy could stay in their spare bedroom for a few months, in exchange for help with Alex and the occasional errand-running and transcribing of Zo’s interviews.
“You want her to live here?” Ethan had bristled. The renovations had just started; already, they were crammed into a fraction of their usual living space. Besides, the last thing he wanted to do was make small talk with some stranger, some Millennial, before he’d even had his first cup of coffee.
Zo had pressed. It would be temporary, a few months tops, just long enough for the girl to figure out her next move. The poor kid needed this, she’d been in such a bad relationship—Zo had said those two words, “bad relationship,” pointedly, some sort of code that Ethan didn’t fully understand.
Besides, Zo argued, couldn’t they both use the help? Zo’s new film project was big: a commission from ESPN of all places, the first paid gig she’d had in a long, long time. “Plus you’ll be busy with your Dr. Ash thing,” Zo said. His latest paid gig was overhauling a website for an ethically dubious “wellness guru,” an Instagram influencer at least fifteen years his junior, known to her growing fandom as “Dr. Ash”—never mind that Ashleigh Skelfoil’s sole credential is a PhD in holistic healing, issued by an online university, accredited only in Liberia, with no apparent physical address.
Finally, Zo had lowered the boom, said the inarguable thing, the thing for which Ethan had no sound comeback: “Besides, don’t you think we need a little help with Alex?” And what could he say to that? Of course they needed the help. At eleven, Alex was somehow still as exhausting, as challenging, as, spirited, as she’d been in the days of velcro light-up sneakers.
So on an unseasonably cold and drizzly day in late May, Maddy had pulled into their driveway in Yoda, her twenty-two-year-old Toyota with a mismatched driver’s side door. They’d all gone outside to greet her—this girl with long, mermaid-blue hair and thrift-shop overalls, this person they recognized only from social media. Maddy had climbed out of her car and taken a long, slow look around. Then she’d tossed her hands in the air and laughed. “Where the fuck am I?”
Even though Alex was standing right there, even though his daughter hadn’t yet finished fifth grade and shouldn’t be hearing language like that, Ethan couldn’t help but laugh too. It wasn’t just the juxtaposition of Maddy’s buoyant laughter with that hard expletive. It’s that in those five words, Maddy had formulated the words to a question that Ethan hadn’t even realized had been building up inside him for years.
Where the fuck was he, anyway?
Spring came and went, and then summer too. Maddy did some babysitting here and there. She searched for jobs online and researched various degree programs, though her next move still hadn’t quite materialized. Now here it is, almost October, and Maddy’s still staying with them. Not that Ethan minds. To the contrary, and to his great surprise, it turns out he doesn’t mind at all.
* * *
—
This ease now. Just the two of them. The faint scent of manure from some distant farm. A faraway dog bark. Almost home.
And is it so wrong, this? As long as it’s just this—just a walk home, a little conversation, that’s all—need it be necessarily wrong?
They reach the edge of the old Starkfield cemetery, the last milestone before home. It’s dark in there. Ethan can just make out the faded gravestones, jutting from the ground at haphazard angles like crooked teeth.
Skeletons beneath soil. Once, those bones were covered in flesh, in muscle and sinew. They were human beings, as real as he, who walked on these same streets, looked upon these very same houses. If they woke now, these old ghosts, what would they think? Of him? Of Maddy’s blue hair? Of the fact that vibrating in his pocket at this very second—Randy again, he’s sure of it, guy’s a pain in the ass—is a tiny computer, ready to give him the answer to every question he could ever ask? What would these dead souls think about this tap-of-finger connection to everything, everyone, the whole world, the universe beyond?
And for all of that, would the skeletons see much difference between him and them?
Then it’s almost as if they have traveled back in time, like they’re in some sort of Jane Austen novel, or maybe a postmodern mash-up, with everything old and new all at the same time, because Maddy slips her arm through his. They walk like this, elbows linked, and oh, man: what would the neighbors think if they saw him now? Would they declare it scandalous that he’s arm-in-arm with someone nearly twenty years his junior? On the other hand, there’s something so goofy about the gesture. It’s the sort of thing Alex would do: Come on, Dad, you be the scarecrow and I’ll be Dorothy. Yes, this is fine. He’s almost certain. He and Maddy are off to see the wizard, that’s all.
Ethan lifts his eyes toward the dome of stars overhead. A miracle, the universe suddenly seems. It’s all a fucking miracle, and never mind the dead: Ethan is alive, and now he knows this for sure.
He longs to tell Maddy everything. He wants to tell her how it felt to grow up outside an old Pennsylvania steel town, how he could stare out the window behind his house and see nothing but farmland, then walk to the front door and see a whole neighborhood, with mothers unpacking groceries and kids in Toughskins playing a game of tag so big, so sprawling, it seemed to comprise the whole world. He wants to tell her about the first time he went to a museum—he was fifteen, it was a school trip—and he’d stared gaping and incredulous at the Gauguins, all those bold blocks of color, those flattened, feminine forms. His heart had pounded, he wanted to reach out and touch those figures, he half believed that if he had, they might come to life, they’d turn around and smile at him from inside their canvases. He wants to tell Maddy that there’s still so much he hopes for, things he can’t even name, things that feel like a word you can’t quite remember, it’s on the tip of your tongue, and as soon as you hear it, you’ll be all, “Yes, that’s it. Yes, that’s exactly right.”
That’s how it is with the things that he hopes for: they’re inside him, still, and he’ll remember them any second now. The veil that’s keeping him from them
is gossamer thin.
But he says nothing, because he doesn’t want to spoil any of this: Maddy’s arm in his. The lone, determined cricket, not yet silenced by cold, trilling in the leaves. This night. The unlikeliness of any of it.
Just past the graveyard, the empty street gives way to parked cars, nearly all plastered in bumper stickers:
Resist.
Persist.
If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
Love everybody no exceptions.
My other car is a broom.
His driveway. Ethan stops walking, his arm still linked with Maddy’s, and takes in his home: the scraped paint, the halted construction (he needs that Bränd money, he really does). Shafts of light hurl themselves from the windows, dissolve into nothing in the darkness.
“Need to steel yourself?” Maddy asks.
“Something like that.”
From inside, music starts up, a sign that Zo’s meeting is almost over. Each week, one member gets to choose a song that’s inspired them. Last week, they played Patti Smith’s “People Have the Power.” The week before that, it was the Beatles’ “Revolution.” Before that, Martha Wainwright’s “Bloody Motherfucking Asshole.” Since the witches started meeting, he’s heard Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” Helen Reddy’s “Ain’t I a Woman?,” that old “Ain’t No Stopping Us Now” song, who the hell knows who wrote it. “Do You Hear the People Sing,” from Les Miz, has come up more than a few times. But whatever song they’re playing tonight, he doesn’t recognize it.
On the front porch, weedy vines hang like abandoned streamers from a long-ago party. Ethan feels his breath enter his lungs, then exit.
Out there is a planet made of diamonds.
Out there is a planet that rains rocks and reaches 4,000 degrees.