Wonder Valley

by Ivy Pochoda

  But Patrick’s words at the sharing session had rooted in her brain—it wasn’t enough to acknowledge her fear without working to overcome it. It was a process Britt understood now, and one she was good at. She’d knocked it out of the park on her first time out, answered one of the questions perfectly, truthfully. So how could she give up?

  There was something else that kept her up on the farm, sleeping on the sagging twin bed, staring at the planes winking in the sky as they passed overhead. An unexpected euphoria had arrived after her sharing session, a high that came from confessing her deepest secret, her worst crime, propelling the story into the vastness of the desert. Like she had finally come face-to-face with the enormity of what she had done. She’d abandoned Andy—dead, alive, she didn’t know.

  But the comedown was hard. Now that she’d admitted what had happened in the SUV—what she had caused to happen by dragging him to a party he had no intention of attending—given it shape and texture, the memory of the accident, the strange slackness in Andy’s face, the way she’d been unable to touch him, to discover what she’d made happen, never left her. And it wasn’t just the accident. It was all the things that had led up to it, all the moments of carelessness—the late nights, the questionable company, the drunken drives. The decision to keep the party going even though everyone else had packed it in, to forfeit the next day’s training which would most likely mean losing the next weekend’s match.

  It was a maddening tangle, a complex and horrifying puzzle, figuring out when she had first put her foot wrong, and which foot, and where. And how that led to all the things that put her in that car with Andy and that car rolling down the ravine and killing him or hurting him or nothing at all. Because there must have been a first error, something that set the whole disaster in motion.

  You can find this moment in every blown match, that split-second what-if that might have sent the ship sailing in the right direction—the return that didn’t sail long, the second serve that clipped the line, the volley that skimmed the net, the look you didn’t give your coach, the cheer from the stands you ignored. All of it discoverable, each wrong decision easily pinpointed, addressed, advised against on the next go-round. If you hadn’t done that, you would have avoided the entire landslide, the descent into chaos. So it had to be there, that initial mistake.

  And there was a chance that if the Toyota hadn’t skidded, or if she hadn’t made Andy go to the party, or if Coach hadn’t told her about losing her scholarship that weekend and she hadn’t been so dead set on getting off campus, Britt would have pulled it together next year, rediscovered the adrenaline rush of working herself to the limit, exhausting her muscles, and, more important, of being the best. But now it was too late. Because there was no way she would be welcome back on campus. No way she’d get another tennis scholarship anywhere.

  So this was where she belonged until she no longer feared things she was capable of, the danger she posed to herself and others. Or until she could pinpoint the precise moment when she’d made the error that brought her out to the ranch. Or until Patrick helped her not just to acknowledge her fear but overcome it. Because that’s what he said he would do just before Owen arrived. He’d promised they’d do it together.

  But for the last three days there had been no more soul-searching, no more questions and answers. The gardens of the interns’ souls had gone untended. Their reasons, fears, and desires unquestioned. And when Britt’s fear had not been addressed, it had become magnified, as if once acknowledged, it had been allowed to grow, rampage like an invasive weed.

  And now these rough men had come, bringing a different sort of danger than what Britt had sensed scuttling in the desert behind her cabin—a dark, real-world violence. Two men in this wide-open ranch, and somehow they managed to make the place feel cramped. Like they had their eyes on everyone and everything. The air between the campfire and Cassidy’s old cabin hung thick with Blake’s cigarette smoke, his sick friend’s rotten smell and the cloud of sage that Patrick burned to make everything better.

  Released from their spiritual questing the interns dropped their hippie shoptalk. They loafed and lounged like your average stoners. When Blake wasn’t sitting with his friend he joined them chain-smoking off-brand cigarettes and popping the odd pill from a dwindling supply in his pocket.

  The interns avoided Sam’s cabin. They worried that Patrick was going to ask them to assist him with whatever herbal healing he was doing. Whenever he attended the sick man, they’d scurry away, plunge into the pond, refill the sun shower, or pretend to be busy with the neglected coop or garden.

  But Britt didn’t mind. She helped Patrick clean the festering wound, apply herbal compresses and ointments to try to take down the swelling. She fanned the sage around the cabin. She reorganized the power rocks around the foot of Sam’s bed. She even assisted with Patrick’s laying on of hands, although touching Sam’s unnaturally warm flesh made her stomach rise.

  She changed the sheets every day, rinsing the sick sweat from the towels she held to Sam’s forehead. As she helped, Britt stared deep into the blackish-green cut and at the swollen purple skin and wondered what Sam’s first misstep had been, what mistake had he made that had landed him here, rotting away in a crappy cabin?

  Blake and Sam had been there for three days. There didn’t seem to be much change in Sam’s condition. He was lucid part of the day but toward the afternoon he began to rave about magic animals and Mexican witches. By evening he’d stopped speaking a recognizable language.

  On the fourth night, the interns gathered around the fire pit out of habit. The vicious excitement that preceded the sharing sessions was gone. But still they came together waiting for Patrick. That night he didn’t sit among them as he had for the last few nights. He didn’t reach for one of the circling joints or take a swig from the container of booze. Instead he took his old place on the tall stump.

  The few interns snuffed their roaches, put their drinks down, and stared at him. There was no electric current, no excitement, no sense that a session was about to start.

  Patrick crossed his legs. He smelled more powerfully of sage than usual, as well as of Sam’s sick stench.

  “Whose turn is it?” He glanced around the circle. No one volunteered. “Gideon,” he said. “Be brave.”

  Gideon’s eyes were loopy, his movements even more noncommittal than usual. “Sure,” he said, like he couldn’t have cared less.

  “Okay,” Patrick said.

  Why are you here? The group’s chant was out of sync, some people starting early, others trailing off, and a few barely raising their voices.

  Gideon pursed his lips, biting back a lazy smile. “I don’t know,” he said.

  A few interns laughed like that was their answer too. For a moment no one took up the attack.

  “Do you think Gideon is telling the truth?” Patrick said. “Do you think Gideon has earned that answer?”

  The fire cracked and snapped. An owl called from behind the main house.

  “Gideon isn’t trying,” someone said.

  “And?” Patrick stared at the interns in turn. “And? And? And?”

  “Gideon has given up on the game,” Britt said.

  “Gideon thinks he’s being honest, but he’s only being lazy.”

  One by one the answers trickled in. Soon they started coming faster, not quite at the usual manic pitch but close. The detached expression left Gideon’s face, replaced by simmering frustration.

  The interns were in it now. They were no longer the drifting, dazed stoners they’d been a few minutes ago. The sharing gave them clarity. It sharpened their edges, sharpened the whole ranch. Brought a solidity to the drifting desert.

  Energy was coiling around the circle, a current winding tighter and tighter, transferring from one intern to another. Their attacks were less specific, less focused on Gideon’s answer than usual. But Patrick didn’t seem to care.

  Britt’s voice climbed above the others because the frenzy of the sharing
crowded out the memory of the skidding Toyota. She wanted to keep going, build the session up, use it to restore order, bring purpose to the ranch.

  She could tell they were approaching the end of the first question. The answers were slowing. Patrick was looking pleased, Gideon defeated.

  The door to Sam’s cabin opened and Blake stepped out. He struck a match on his teeth and lit a cigarette. The circle began to quiet. Anushna shouted out a final answer.

  “Good,” Patrick said.

  Blake’s laugh cut the silence that preceded the chanting of the next question.

  “The fuck is all this then?” He took a seat on a vacant bench between Britt and Patrick. “You playing some sort of game?”

  “It’s a sharing session,” Patrick said.

  “Is that so?” Blake said. “How about one of you share some of that weed with me.”

  “Not until the session’s over.” Patrick held up his hand, signaling the next question.

  “Well, okay, then. Don’t mind me.” Blake took off one of his sneakers and began cleaning it with a dirty bandanna.

  The group stayed silent.

  “Like I said,” Blake repeated. “Don’t mind me.”

  The interns chanted the second question. Gideon gave his answer. But he sounded tentative, not just uncertain of his response but uncertain about the game itself.

  The group started their attack but the venom wasn’t there. Every once in a while one of them glanced at Blake who’d begun picking at his cuticle with a match. He flicked the match into the fire. “How come you’re all so sure about this shit?”

  “They’re not,” Patrick said. “I’m here to show them they’re not sure about anything.”

  “I could have told you all that.” Blake extended his hand over to Gideon, waggling his fingers until Gideon passed the roach. Blake put it between his lips. “Continue,” he said.

  But the current had died. The interns were slouched on their benches.

  Blake sparked the joint and passed it. “Sorry,” he said. “A man needs to be high to listen to this shit.” The weed circled. No one spoke.

  The mason jars of booze reappeared. Anushna turned on the boom box. Patrick slid off his stump. Gideon went to his cabin and came back with a plastic handle of whiskey. The bottle circled three times before it was half done.

  Anushna started her fire dance. Blake reached up as she passed, grabbed a handful of her batik dress, and pulled her toward him. She laughed and fell onto his lap. “Let me read your aura,” she said.

  She straddled him and held her hands in front of his face, tickling the air. “I’m not sure what you’re doing, sweetheart,” Blake said. “But I sure as shit don’t mind.”

  Britt had accepted the bottle several times and had taken a few too many hits of the joint. The interns grew wild. Their language turned rough. Their stories dirty. It was as if Blake had sliced the air with a knife, letting the outside world in. They played drinking games, chain-smoked their way through Blake’s last cigarettes, popped some pills from his stash.

  When Anushna and one of the male interns began tangling together on the ground just behind the fire pit, Patrick stood and staggered back to the house. Britt watched him climb the single step to the low porch, then steady himself for a beat against a glider before lurching through the door.

  Blake had returned to Sam’s cabin. Which left Britt.

  She was on her feet, crossing the driveway, stumbling over the loose gravel. She tripped on the porch step. The screen door slammed behind her.

  The house was dark; the door to James’s room was shut.

  Britt fumbled down the hall, knocking something on the wall askew. She could hear the swamp cooler chugging in the master bedroom. The door was cracked. She nudged it open.

  Patrick lay on the bed like a dead man. He didn’t budge when she lay down next to him. The room spun. Britt put one foot on the floor to steady herself and Patrick reached for her, pulling her back onto the bed.

  It wasn’t that bad, she told herself later in her cabin. She’d wanted to do it. She’d left the campfire, crossed the driveway, entered the house. Of her own free will. She’d wanted to be wanted like he’d wanted her after the chicken slaughter. Wanted to be wanted more than Cassidy or Grace, because at the end of the day, she’d stuck it out when they couldn’t. And she wanted Patrick to want her enough to help her like he’d promised.

  It had been quick, that was something Britt had to be thankful for. Like Patrick had some urgent need she was helping him fulfill—not sexual but visceral, a need for motion, activity, a need to shake himself free of everyone’s abandonment, a passing desire to escape the ranch itself into a blackout pool of sweat and breath and skin.

  When he was done, he flopped on his back. “Jesus Christ.”

  Britt pulled her knees to her chest, unsure whether to touch him or to leave.

  “What a fucking mess.”

  The swamp cooler gurgled. The house resettled.

  “You mean with Sam and Blake?”

  Patrick raked his fingers through his bristly beard. “Them and the rest of it.”

  “Can you help him?”

  “Who? Sam?” Patrick kicked the sheet off the bed. “No, Britt, I can’t help him. I can’t help any of you.”

  26

  REN, LOS ANGELES, 2010

  Darrell knew all about the guy Laila had met by the bus. He told Ren his name was Blake and his hustle was buying folks’ meds and reselling them. He even knew where he lived—in a trailer, in a neighborhood just northwest of downtown. But there was no need to search him out, Darrell explained, Blake always turned up. Which was exactly what Ren wanted to prevent. If Laila couldn’t sell her meds, there was a chance she might take them, and that might buy him a little more time to make some scratch to get them off Skid Row.

  Laila was feeling good that morning. She was up before Ren, sitting in a chair next to Darrell, finishing a joint, and picking at the edges of yesterday’s untouched lunch.

  “You got somewhere to be?” she asked, eyeing Ren and his backpack. He ducked into her tent, retrieving the marker he’d left there the previous afternoon. He’d done three broadsheet-sized drawings of the ocean, his fat, black lines rippling across the newsprint in a way he hoped made the waves and clouds he’d drawn move and sway. The drawings were tucked into the tent poles where he’d left them, hanging so that they would be the first thing Laila saw when she sat up.

  “I have plans of my own today,” he said, popping out of the tent.

  “A man with a plan,” she said. Then she glanced at the marker in his hand. “A boy with his toys.”

  REN GOT ON THE WRONG BUS TWICE ON HIS WAY TO GLENDALE BOULEVARD. No one had told him there was a Glendale Freeway and no one mentioned that there was a whole other part of the city called Glendale. Eventually he found the spot Darrell had described.

  There was a line of campers on the west side of the street opposite a steep hill. One of them was painted with all sorts of religious shit—crosses, Bible passages, a baby Ren assumed was supposed to be Jesus. Others had windows that were either blacked out, covered with dirty cloth, or piled high with too much crap to get a look inside.

  Ren paced the street, trying to guess which one belonged to the guy with his mom’s meds. Finally, a little Hispanic dude stepped out of the religious camper. He was shirtless and wearing shower sandals. He slap-slapped over to the embankment at the base of the hill and started scraping something out of a frying pan onto the ground. Whatever had been in that pan smelled pretty damn good.

  Ren came up next to him, making the little man jump. “You know a guy called Blake?”

  The man looked Ren up and down and backed away.

  “Blake,” Ren said. “White guy. Looks like he might have been left behind by a heavy metal band.”

  “Señor Blake not in a band,” the man said.

  “No shit.”

  The man shuffled from foot to foot making his sandals squeak.

  “So whic
h one of these is his?”

  The man pointed to the camper next to his—a smallish white bubble with a gray-washed sheet hanging over the window. “Señor Blake sleeping now,” he said.

  “Perfect,” Ren said.

  He meant to bang on the door, rattle the man awake. But he hadn’t figured on his fist shaking the fiberglass wall, making the camper vibrate and rock. From the inside Ren heard the sound of someone startled from sleep, the sound of something getting knocked over, something else scattering on the floor. The whole camper shook as the door opened.

  The man was wearing only a pair of black jeans. He was skinny, with loose flesh at his waistband. His black hair was sleep matted on one side.

  “The fuck—”

  “Are you Blake?” Ren put a hand on the camper door so the dude couldn’t shut it.

  “The fuck you care?”

  “I care,” Ren said, “because you’ve been messing with my mom.”

  “Jesus,” Blake said, patting his pocket, like he might have slept on a pack of smokes. “What the hell is all this now?”

  “I saw you yesterday and a month before that.”

  Blake held up a hand. “Not guilty, Judge.”

  “Yeah,” Ren said. “Yeah, you are. You been scamming off my mom for years now. Least that’s what folks downtown are saying.”

  “Are they?” Blake reached behind him and fumbled on a fold-down table until he grasped his cigarettes. “You better step inside. I don’t need all the nice folks around here thinking I’m a criminal, now, do I?”

  He made room for Ren to pass but stayed in the doorway to smoke. Ren stood, wedged between the bed and the wall, his shoulders stooped and his chin tucked into his neck. The camper was cramped and smelled like stale laundry. Some kind of tribal weaving—a round hoop hung with beads and feathers—dangled from the ceiling over the bed. A chess set with mismatched pieces sat on the folding table. “Why don’t you make yourself comfortable?” Blake gestured at the bed.

  Ren sat, making the chess set jump.