“Louisa?” I finally asked when my addled wits began to return. “You said you made copies of things? In the Lakeview office?”
“Yeah, I don’t really know exactly what all we managed to get, but the idea was to put some shit up online. Personal info about the head honchos, anything that seems at all incriminating. In the interest of transparency, of course.” She rumpled her nose and shrugged. “I’m not sure what the plan was, exactly. I think Beau might have intended to go terrorize the higher-ups personally, once he had their addresses. Something extreme, no doubt. In any case, he had all the information on him when he…” Louisa trailed off, her mouth tightening.
“How did you get inside?” I asked. “To access the offices? I mean, you can’t have just walked in there.”
“Well, you’re not entirely a fool, I guess,” she acknowledged wryly. “That’s what a lot of the money got used for. We had an inside guy.”
“Seriously? You paid someone off?”
“Low-level office flunky, from what I understand. All Fennel’s purview, of course. Matthew put them in touch. I don’t know too much about it.”
“And the, uh, gun?”
“Ditto. Matthew”—she said his name contemptuously—“showed up with the firearms. We are not to be trusted with the nitty-gritty. Not that getting a gun is at all difficult.”
We sat in silence, contemplating the gray bleakness outside.
“What will we do about Chloe?” I finally asked, for the third or fourth time since arriving home. It was evident that Chloe was not well; she was just short of catatonic. Louisa told me that Chloe had lethargically sipped some soup she’d brought her. When I’d gone to visit her, she had been in bed. She’d raised her head and given me a wan smile, then turned back towards the wall. Although I’d stroked her back through the thick comforter, I may as well not have been there.
“I don’t know what to do for her. I know she has depressive spells, especially in the winter, but this…” Louisa shook her head. “This is more on a scale of a proper breakdown. Which worries me. Obviously.”
“Me too.”
“It’s happened before, you know,” Louisa said after a pause. “She was hospitalized in her first year of school. She’s bipolar, maybe. She’s been on meds as long as I’ve known her. I’m worried that she may have stopped taking them.” I watched Louisa’s wide forehead contort, etched with concern, and suddenly, unable to help myself, I started laughing. Louisa squinted at me with suspicion until I was able to speak.
“We are one sorry bunch,” I finally said. “I’m an eight-fingered dropout with massive debt, you’re a terrorist, Chloe is a bona fide nutjob, and two of us are popsicles out in the woods!”
“Well, when you put it that way,” Louisa said drily. “Want some more tea?”
* * *
We sat around the Homestead for several days, unsure what to do. The local news had a lot of coverage about the blizzard’s aftermath—power outages, a dead homeless woman, salt shortages, etc. There were also a few mentions of the vandalism at Lakeview, linked with the nearby car accident involving a security guard and a possible suspect. In spite of our agreement not to contact anyone at the Collective, I was itching to text Natasha to see if Fennel had been arrested or was being questioned. The cops interviewed Louisa and me twice, trying to figure out if we knew anything about the Lakeview attack; security footage had shown that there was more than one person involved, and Fennel would have to give someone up eventually.
When the cops pulled up the drive a third time, I had my suspicions about what they were coming to tell us. Louisa met them at the door of the big cabin, where I joined her. We left Chloe in her cabin. The cops were gentle when they told us about the body they had found. From their description, it seemed evident that it was Jack. I pictured his clear blue eyes frozen shut, his lips colorless, his sandy hair immobilized in ice. I felt a desperate stab as I remembered running my hands through that hair on a New Year’s Eve that seemed like it was part of a different millennium. As I sat listening to a bland recital of his “painless” final moments, all I could think of was regret, frantic regret that I hadn’t fucked him that night. This seemed like an unforgivable error, something I would never have the chance to correct. The strangeness of this thought, this one particular regret, anchored me and prevented me from considering the vastness of what really had been lost: the life he would have had, all that was held in his brain, watching his hair grow gray. Louisa leaned over and squeezed my good hand, and I realized I had been sitting there utterly unresponsive.
Louisa and I went together, full of dread, to Chloe’s cabin. I was barely able to speak and had no idea how we would tell Chloe—Chloe who had wandered around like a ghost these past few days and who gave the impression that she might simply evaporate. Louisa, grim-faced, seemed to realize that she would have to do the talking, and I could see her marshaling her words. In the end, when we sat on the edge of Chloe’s bed and Chloe turned to us with her wide-set eyes, blond hair clinging to her damp forehead, Louisa said simply: “It was Jack. They found Jack.”
Chloe rolled over wordlessly and wept into the mattress, the blanket pulled over her head. Louisa and I stroked her, trying to soothe her quaking, but she didn’t stop. I looked over at Louisa after ten minutes, and saw that she was weeping, too, her pink cheeks glistening. She said nothing. Realizing that I was about to lose my composure, I stumbled from the cabin, shaking freezing tears from my lashes as I headed towards my own bed. Inside, I could only ball myself up on the bed and sob. I wept for Jack, and for Beau, who was certainly dead as well, but in that moment, I most wanted Argos, his sweet, sympathetic nose buried in my neck. And so I mourned the dog, because the loss of my friends felt too big.
I was awakened by the bright lights of an ambulance later that night, and in a sleepy delirium, I thought maybe they’d found Beau, and they were just dropping him off at home. I stumbled down the ladder and was pulling on my boots before I realized the impossibility of this fantasy. Outside my window, the ambulance was stopped next to Chloe’s cabin. Flinging a shawl around my shoulders, I raced across the clearing, where Louisa stood, shivering and watching a team of paramedics carry Chloe from her bed.
“She’s okay,” Louisa immediately reassured me. “I don’t think she actually meant to die. She said she just lost track of how many she’d taken.”
“Jesus, she overdosed? On what?”
“Mostly her anti-anxiety meds. But apparently she got her hands on some of Sy’s oxy, which didn’t help.”
I shut my eyes. Maybe it was time to leave.
* * *
—
But the next morning, I couldn’t bring myself to abandon Louisa, who clearly hadn’t slept, and who was fluttering around the big cabin in a fit of activity. She couldn’t settle. I watched her burn oatmeal, make three consecutive cups of tea that she didn’t drink, and then just stand there, staring out the kitchen window. When she reached for her heavy coat to go outside, I was afraid to ask her what she was doing.
“Going to look for Beau, of course,” she said. “Can you give me a ride?”
So I found myself setting out towards the national forest again, Louisa staring pensively out the window. I realized that I couldn’t really drive with my damaged hand; shifting was deeply painful, and I tried unsafely to do it with my left, wincing.
Louisa noticed my difficulty by the time I was getting the truck into third gear, and after a pause, she said, “Pull over. I think you’d better let me drive.”
I was hesitant but in too much pain to protest. “What’s a ticket for driving without a license at this stage?” she said, so I let her maneuver my truck over the still-snowy roads to the forest. For someone who categorically refused to drive, she seemed capable enough, and only her white-knuckled grip on the wheel revealed her nerves.
Our search in the forest was, unsurprisingly, fruitless. It was a clear
day, but we had difficulty walking in the deep snow. I fell once and managed to resist decades of conditioning to avoid landing on my injured hand. Louisa called for Beau for nearly two hours as we circled the area around the trail where she’d last seen him. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that this was madness, that if Beau was still out here, in the woods, he would be frozen. But I understood her need to do something, however pointless.
After our antics in the snow, we drove around to a few of the houses near the forest. Louisa knocked on doors and asked strangers if they had seen Beau. She even peered into a few chicken coops, hoping to find him curled up and surrounded by a warm flock of poultry. As it grew dark, we headed home.
“I’ll try again tomorrow. And maybe I’ll post something on Craigslist.”
“What? Craigslist?”
“Beau loved to read the Missed Connections section. It was sort of a hobby of his,” she said with a private smile. “It was silly, but I think it appealed to his inner romantic.” She shook her head, clearly remembering a younger version of Beau. “Anyway, if he’s hiding out somewhere, he might try to contact me—us—that way. You know, if he managed to get out of the woods and somewhere safe.”
“Louisa—” I began.
“I know. But I keep thinking Matthew could have gotten to Beau. He couldn’t come with us to Lakeview, but we called him when things went wrong. I keep wondering if maybe, I don’t know, maybe if he came back to look for us and Beau was near the road…” She didn’t finish. It was the desperate reasoning of denial, and we both knew it. Yet even though I found it an implausible scenario, I clung to it, hoping that Louisa might be right. Her pursuit had a sad, frantic quality, and I didn’t have the heart to dissuade her from roaming the forest looking for her lost love, the Heathcliff to Beau’s Cathy.
* * *
—
Later that day, Chuck Larson appeared at the Homestead. I was alarmed—surely he hadn’t come here to continue the dispute?—and Louisa immediately stiffened. But he stepped out of his truck with an armful of flowers and walked slowly towards the front door; we watched through a window until he reached the steps.
“I came to offer my condolences. We heard about your friends,” he began stiffly. “I was sorry to hear about it. These are from my wife.”
“Sustainably grown, no doubt,” Louisa said. I jabbed her in the ribs with my elbow.
“Thank you,” I said. “It’s nice of you to stop by.”
“That’s how we are around here. You look out for your neighbors.” It was tense out here on the stoop, and I looked down at my feet, clad in the socks Jack had knit for me. If I wasn’t careful, I would lose some toes too.
“I appreciate you stopping by,” Louisa finally said. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“Look, I’m not a bad guy. I’m sorry about how things went down here, but I’m just trying to make an honest living.”
“And my dog?” I couldn’t help asking. “What about Argos?”
“That wolf thing? What—what are you talking about?”
“Are you sorry about him too?”
“Look, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I just wanted to come over and tell you I’m real sorry for your friends. It’s hard when someone that young goes, and I know you folks must be having a rough time. If there’s something you need, well, you can ask. We’re still your neighbors.”
“I thought you sold off your rights,” Louisa said.
“We’re still your neighbors,” Chuck Larson repeated. “And here in Hector that counts for something. My best wishes.” He tapped the brim of his John Deere baseball cap and turned to leave.
* * *
After Jack’s body was found, neither Louisa nor I had any desire to stay at the Homestead. Chloe remained in the hospital, on a seventy-two-hour suicide watch. We didn’t believe that she had truly tried to die, but she’d come close nevertheless. After those three days, Chloe voluntarily committed herself for a six-month inpatient treatment.
Fennel was arrested first, and Louisa followed shortly afterward. It was obvious that Fennel had given her up—possibly out of spite, possibly because she was too tired to lie—but Louisa seemed almost relieved. She’d been wandering around in such a cloud of guilt that she seemed grateful to be punished. She and Fennel both pleaded guilty. Louisa was sentenced to nine months, Fennel to three years because she had been driving and had the subsequent charge of reckless endangerment. She and Louisa were both lucky that bullets were never found; either Beau had missed, or they were overlooked. I glimpsed Fennel once, waiting for Louisa’s hearing; her dreads had been shaved off, and I hoped for her sake she was still adhering to her no-mirror policy. I considered her jail time inadequate—I still suspected her of murdering our dog, in order to protect Matthew and conceal the charges against him. Perhaps she thought that by erasing Argos, she could somehow erase what happened between Matthew and Lisa, or erase the trail that would connect the two. She was not, I believe, entirely sane. She hadn’t given up Matthew, and I heard nothing of him; he had effectively vanished.
I ask myself, from time to time, who is responsible. Who bears the burden for what we did and failed to do? Fennel and her cold machinations, Louisa with her heated rage? Beau, probably, should shoulder the most blame, but, as ever, I can’t seem to hold him fully responsible. I blame myself, who did nothing, nothing but write and get the story wrong. My project lurks like a spider, waiting to entrap me again. I know better now, though, than to navigate that web.
I visited Louisa only once before departing for South Africa. Still defiant and sharp-tongued, she seemed okay in prison, and I left knowing that I would worry about her but she would be fine. Chloe wouldn’t be allowed to see visitors for several more weeks, so I had no way to say goodbye. The decision to go was easy and sudden: I stumbled across an online article about voluntourism in Africa, and half a day of Internet research led me to Cape Town and JobsNow. I was so desperate to leave I didn’t even consider other options.
And so I have sat here, doing penance. Filling my days with tasks. The sheer folly of what we tried to do is stark from this perspective. To grow our own vegetables and bathe in a pond? I’ve seen hardship now, seen those who live hand to mouth. Looking at these townships, I understand that our venture was just a silly little game. The vanity of it! But what could we do? I’ve done no good here, just sought a salve for my mewling conscience.
* * *
—
The last letter I receive in Cape Town haunts me, like many of those early ones I received after heading home to Ithaca. This one, though, doesn’t come from pissed-off viewers; nor does it come from Auburn Correctional. She’s out.
I recognize Louisa’s handwriting, unfurling madly across the page. I skim at first, trying to ascertain with a quick glance why she has written me, my stomach flipping with possibility and dread. Has she written to say that Beau has been found? Dead, alive? That Chloe has succeeded in her bid to end it? That the Homestead has burned to the ground and the Collective has disbanded and the apocalypse has finally come to the whole Burned-Over District?
No. She writes none of this. The seedlings are starting slow this year; it has been rainy and cold so far. She is sick of another winter, sick of firewood. Her new year, she says, has been like Thoreau’s, solitude in the woods—Beau would be pleased. But she feels she has been doing penance, rather than seeking the good life. And in some ways, she writes, this is easier. You don’t have to aspire, to live fully, you simply have to endure penance. There are fewer choices. It has been lonely on the Homestead, though the solitude is better than having to face other people.
She is expecting Chloe, who has been slowly climbing out of her chemical hole. It has been a long year for her, too, but Chloe is stronger than we gave her credit for. Louisa has been sprucing up her cabin in preparation, hanging conifer branches near the door, stacking wood in case of sp
ring squalls. I can almost see her hesitation in writing those words, “spring squalls.” She doesn’t mention my cabin, but it hovers there, ghostly. They are all filled with ghosts, each of those buildings. Though she doesn’t say it, I know there will be pine boughs at my threshold and a stack of wood by my door. Do I dare face those ghosts? Can I live side by side with them?
But, of course, I already do. My old delicious burdens. It is time to carry them home.
For Collin and Xeno
Acknowledgments
Thank you to Molly Atlas, who has shepherded this manuscript from vague notion to actual, existing book. Thanks to Kara Cesare, who, as always, sees into these characters and patiently draws them out of hiding. To all the people at Random House involved in editing, design, and production—particularly Bonnie Thompson and Loren Noveck, who catch errors both micro and macro and spare me vast embarrassment. Thank you to everyone at ICM and Curtis Brown who has read, commented, and nudged this book into the world.
Thank you to my family: Em, for reading this book several times and insisting that there is actually something there and that I really should finish it. To my dad, Mike, who helped with my “research garden” and made maple syrup with me as a kid, and taught me the names of local flora and fauna out in his woods. To my mom, who listened to me rant about this novel for years. To my dad’s neighbors, the Benfords, who let me assist in the annual turkey slaughter and plunder their amazing garden. To the various people in the Ithaca/Trumansburg/Mecklenburg food community who answered questions about cheeses and curing meat and crunchy sauerkraut—chances are that if you spoke to me in the last two or three years, I asked you about sprouts or compost. To my South African cohort, who have read, discussed, and given me insights: Christopher Honey, and my Steyn family, Lauren, Elbert, and Marinda. To my friends Katy Schoedel, Erik Hillman, and Joanna Cerro, for reading and reminding me of our misspent youths and pond swims and nights spent prowling outdoors. To the friends we have lost, Collin Anderson and Xeno Taylor-Fontana, who are there in every word.
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