We Went to the Woods is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2019 by Caitlin Dolan-Leach
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Dolan-Leach, Caite, author.
Title: We went to the woods : a novel / Caite Dolan-Leach.
Description: New York : Random House, [2019]
Identifiers: LCCN 2018042712 | ISBN 9780399588884 | ISBN 9780399588891 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PS3604.O429 W4 2019 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018042712
Ebook ISBN 9780399588891
randomhousebooks.com
Design by Virginia Norey, adapted for ebook
Cover design: Jaya Miceli
Cover image: Mary Jane Newill / Getty Images
Art from original photos by FreeImages.com and attributed as follows:
Title page / Pete Hellebrand; part titles: Winter / Troy Sherk, Spring / Sandy Yin, Summer / Liviu J, Autumn / John Evans, 2nd Winter / Benjamin Earwicker.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Prologue
Winter
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Spring
Chapter 8
From the Diary of William Fulsome
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Summer
From the Diary of William Fulsome
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Autumn
From the Diary of William Fulsome
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Winter
From the Diary of William Fulsome
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Dedication
Acknowledgments
By Caite Dolan-Leach
About the Author
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
—HENRY DAVID THOREAU, Walden
In one word, Thoreau was a skulker. He did not wish virtue to go out of him among his fellow-men, but slunk into a corner to hoard it for himself. He left all for the sake of certain virtuous self-indulgences.
—ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, Familiar Studies of Men and Books
And what is wrong with their life? What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?
—PHILIP ROTH, American Pastoral
I’m the wrong one to tell our story. I was the late arrival, the last on board, the self-effacing supplement to the lopsided structure of which Louisa and Beau were the main architects. If only it were Beau telling our tale, drawling his way through it, cigarillo dangling from his lips. Or Louisa, nattering on with her breakneck fluency. Best of all, maybe, Jack, with his sculpted insights, frank amazement, arms carving out a circumference of joy. Chloe could convince anyone that we were beautiful and right and noble to do what we did. Instead, of the five of us, I am the only one left. I was the least important, the watchful cipher who served only as an audience and an extra body, an afterthought. Maybe Beau knew that he would need someone outside their tight quadrilateral, to record and capture them, to witness—an extra point to make a pentagon. After all, he was the only one who knew the ending of the story we all thought we were writing together.
Today, I watched a squatter take a shit on the hill directly opposite my apartment window, and I thought of our composting toilet, the filth of five people, which we diligently shoveled, each in our turn. I wonder if she’s still there, or whether she has abandoned our little failed paradise, leaving the basil to seed and the squash to rot back into the ground. I don’t know what I hope for.
I am self-conscious here, feeling badly misplaced in Africa. Everyone talks about crime, obsessively. Every time I stretch my legs out to touch the sidewalk, I glance around, wondering who has noticed me, who has marked my body as a target. I leave my earrings, a gift from Chloe, at home, carry my effects in a ratty tote bag rather than in Jack’s expensive backpack, which Louisa bequeathed to me before we parted. I do not want to advertise my privilege. I carry it around, ashamed of it and myself, lying about what I pay for airfare or computers or cheese. What to do about it? Give it back? I may as well try to give away my skin. I rub the now-smooth knuckles of my right hand, where my two missing fingers used to be, and think of those mislaid digits as twin ghosts.
Today is the anniversary. I will be hauntingly aware of it, an old delicious burden, all day, nursing it along, sipping from it as if from a hidden flask. It seems unreal, though, here in the sunlight. Today, those four people are just constructs. I came here as penance, but also partly to avoid experiencing another wintry March. So that I can separate myself from the person who feels that cold, heavy sky pulling downward on my skin. Here, in the sun, winter is impossible. And so they cannot be dead. No wintry roads and half-lit sunsets. No cults, no messy, complicated sex. No rabid convictions and desperate bids to defend them. One year since the failure of our (was it ours? or theirs? or maybe just his?) Experiment. One year since “the accident.” By all appearances, I wake up, go to the townships, and halfheartedly teach English, but truly, I’m still awakening at dawn, sitting on the porch of the big cabin, sipping coffee in sleepy silence with the four of them. I put myself to sleep with a little pill, but I’m really watching the fire as Beau throws another log onto it, laughing at the taste of Jack’s first appalling attempt at honey mead, watching Louisa’s red hair mimic the flame, Chloe sidling up close like an adored cat and meeting a pair of lips. (Whose?) Our bodies twining together, separating, returning. I am still there with them, and I know that I will never really leave.
* * *
Louisa called it apocalyptic provisioning, Jack called it the Grand Experiment, Chloe called it simply our homestead, and Beau never gave it a name. He didn’t need to; he was certain enough of what we were doing that he didn’t have to give it substance with clever words. It was real to him, in a way that we didn’t fully grasp until it ended. I sought desperately for a clever title of my own but never mustered the courage to float my suggestions. Privately, I thought we could reasonably be called preppers, survivalists. We soon adopted Chloe’s title in any case. Naturally.
&
nbsp; We all secretly acknowledged that Louisa and Beau were the engineers of our experiment, though they insisted on maintaining the fiction that it had been engendered by the five of us. They had been talking about escaping the world, starting it over and doing it right, since tenth grade. But they claimed that it was only when we all came together that their project began to seem like a real possibility. We were the missing pieces, and nothing could begin until we were all united.
Supposedly.
Chapter 1
The day I met Louisa was not a good one. I woke early, as I had been doing since my ignominious homecoming, and, in spite of myself, reached for my phone. After everything that had happened on the show, I’d publicly tweeted an apology before shutting down my Facebook and Instagram and Twitter; all had become so toxic that just the sight of those little icons on my screen made my stomach flip with dread. My email, however, was still a miserable depository for the anger that could no longer be directed at my body or my social media. I opened it every morning despite the regularity with which threats and hatred found their way to me through the Internet.
This morning, there was just one new entry. I thought this might bode well for my day, even for my (shattered) future. Perhaps it signaled a downtick in the rage I had sparked? After all, how long could this group of strangers pursue me?
Today’s email was not from the usual crowd of pissed-off spectators, however. I could typically disregard those messages as the words of (justifiably) frustrated but abstract strangers. This email was from Sara, my betrayed housemate, and she was calm and reasonable and direct, as ever. We hadn’t communicated since she had publicly denounced me, and reading her words made me shudder with guilt. She couldn’t forgive me, she said, but she needed to move on from what had happened and I should too. I threw up in the bathroom, clutching the cold tile of the floor and inhaling the ammoniac reek of piss, before I read the email again. Crouched on the shaggy blue shower mat, I looked at Sara’s words again and again, and wished I could undo what I had done. I had replayed that disastrous interview so many times to myself, with so many eloquent justifications spun out soundlessly in the dark of my bedroom, rehearsed for an imagined audience. But this morning, reading her email, there was no denying that what I had done couldn’t be excused. Whatever my delusions, I had badly fucked up.
During the last few months, I had developed a schedule to accommodate my desire to avoid my parents, with whom I was living. A disgraced baby bird returned to the nest. Though I sometimes woke while they were puttering around in their nearly silent morning routine of coffee and dry toast and backing vehicles out of the driveway to head drudgingly to work, I would lurk in my room until the sound of their two decrepit cars had faded. I listened to them talk at breakfast, in hushed tones about me and in glowing tones about my little brother, Ben, who was their success story, I supposed. Ben’s friends, Ben’s Future in Finance. Mackenzie’s Failures.
After they headed off, I would go about my own dreary routine. Instead of swapping out sweatpants for something with a zipper, I would plunk myself down on the living room couch and flip open my laptop to begin my desperate daily hunt. Not a lot of jobs out there, however, for someone who had recently been publicly discredited. Occasionally, when I was particularly self-loathing, I would Google myself, which would remind me what my chances of employment really were.
I was an hour or two into my grim scavenging when my phone rang. I pounced on it, irrationally hoping that this might at last be the tug on the line, a fish, however tiny, that I could reel in. I swallowed and growled, to clear my throat, before answering in my very best professional voice.
“Hi, this is Mack Johnston,” I said.
“Changed your name, huh? I know who you are. And what you did. I hope someone betrays your trust as—”
I jerked the phone away from my face, glancing briefly at the number before stabbing the red icon to end the call. I thought I’d successfully changed my number and hidden my tracks after fleeing Brooklyn, but clearly someone had ferreted out my details yet again. The knowledge of my continued visibility made me feel vulnerable, even sitting here, buoyed by low-budget Raymour & Flanigan and my mother’s tacky throw pillows.
Thankfully, I had work today, a catering gig I’d had on and off since high school, and one of the few options for employment open to me. The money was better than nothing but would not allow me to move out of my parents’ house; I was barely able to afford a meager shopping list and the occasional cup of coffee. I had no idea what I’d do when I could no longer defer my student loans. And I was still waiting to hear if there would be a lawsuit, of course.
I was grateful to go to work most days, because it meant leaving the house and escaping my sinister laptop. Because Ithaca is such a small town, I did occasionally find myself having to answer awkward questions about what I was currently doing and what my plans were, but I was grateful to be doing something, anything at all. If people knew what had happened to me—what I had done—they tactfully pretended not to. Even if most of my days felt useless, days where I came home with some cash felt like they hadn’t been entirely wasted. This depressed me, this feeling that my life mattered only as it was measured out in paper dollars. But most things depressed me at the moment. At least it was harder to mope while up to my elbows in greasy dishwater or passing hors d’oeuvres to a roomful of strangers who were perfectly happy to ignore me. I was enjoying the invisibility of the food service worker.
Until the afternoon I worked a fundraiser and met Louisa.
* * *
—
The event was for the wealthy supporters of the Land Trust, a group of people committed to conservation on the lakefronts of the Finger Lakes. Their mission was to prevent development in natural environments all along the shores of our lake, and this little shindig was being held at the lab of ornithology, an architecturally impressive building set in the middle of a bird swamp. My antipathy towards the bulk of these catering events meant that I rarely paid attention to their purpose or their patrons, and I usually passed canapés listlessly, too busy wallowing in my own gloom to engage with anyone. I liked the idea of this party, though, which was being held either to raise money to protect a swath of lakeside nesting grounds for loons and other fowl or to celebrate having already raised the impressively large sum. It was a nice change of pace from bat mitzvahs held in temple basements or departmental parties where everyone wore the same expression of bored obligation and the grad students tried to knock back as much cheap albariño as they could manage.
While the ornithology lab was a beautiful building, it wasn’t really set up for food service, and after I’d lugged several cocktail tables upstairs and schlepped in tablecloths from the vans, my calves were screaming. I lobbied my boss to be installed behind the bar, a task I preferred to passing apps; those who frequented the foldout table covered with rented linens and local wines were deeply appreciative of my services, while the same people impatiently swatted away the platters of crostini and tartlets. I poured hefty glugs of wine into the plastic cups of those who held them out, and leaned against the wall while various members of the Land Trust gave speeches and talked about the waterbirds and the woodlands that would now remain safe because of these millions of dollars. I felt very pleased that the loons would have their home preserved, but also a bit queasy at the vastness of the wealth being displayed. The room was very white.
At some point, a caption contest was announced, and the room tittered with pleasure. Buzzed folk love a competition. I’ve watched drunk parents at fancy birthdays play cornhole for two hours, never growing bored of chucking a beanbag into a box.
The drawing to be captioned was of a melting iceberg, upon which was perched a visibly nervous polar bear. The crowd was requested to provide a pithy caption, the most entertaining of which would secure its author a very extravagant gift basket.
I knew that I wasn’t supposed to enter the co
mpetition. But I also knew that if I did, it would be extremely poor form for the organizers to exclude me; they could hardly reject my entry just because I was the Help. And I was skull-crackingly bored. So, in a moment of quiet at my bar station, I slunk over to the entry box, grabbed a Sharpie, and scribbled the first thing that had popped into my head, not looking around to see if anyone was observing my bold move. I felt seen, though, out of place in my all-black uniform and my clogs.
Back at the bar, I was tense. I craved invisibility, and yet I had just positioned myself for possible exposure, exactly as I had done last year in Brooklyn. I seemed to always battle between a conscious desire to stay hidden and a more sneaky desire for the spotlight. I tossed back a tumbler of wine when I thought no one was looking.
As the evening was drawing to a close, the competition winners were announced. Everyone was milling boozily around, eager for the results. The runner-up entries were embarrassing; they were silly and badly phrased, and bore the mark of people trying too hard to be funny. My heart began to thud as I realized what was about to happen.
“And the winner is—and I must say, they’re a bit of a dark horse—but the winner is Mackenzie Johnston. Mackenzie, are you around? I understand she works with the caterers.” Though some members of the crowd looked a teensy bit miffed, I could tell that others were visibly pleased at my win, and I felt chastened for my certainty of their class disapproval. I was sure that I had written “Mack” on my entry, not “Mackenzie”; the woman must have checked with my boss, who had always called me by my full name.
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