The New Wilderness

by Diane Cook

  “No way,” said Celeste. “But I don’t think it’s because she loves me. She’s just too scared to leave me. She hates to do anything by herself. She can’t even go to the shit pit by herself.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. During the day I have to go with her.”

  “What if you’re not there?”

  “Maybe she finds someone else, but honestly, I think she holds it. And in the night—” She stopped. “I shouldn’t tell you.”

  “What?”

  “She just pees right behind her bed.”

  “In the sleeping circle?”

  “Yeah. She wakes me up to be a lookout, and then she wraps one of the skins around her and squats. It’s ridiculous.”

  “That is so gross,” Patty whined.

  “Has she gotten caught?”

  “Once. She crawled back into bed, and we heard someone say, ‘Tsk-tsk, naughty Helen.’”

  “Who was it?”

  Celeste rolled her eyes. “Carl, duh.”

  “Ew,” breathed Patty, stepping closer to Celeste.

  “Did he say anything in the morning?”

  “Oh, probably. I’m sure my mom fucked him and then he was cool with it.”

  “What?” Agnes and Patty shrieked.

  “Oh, yeah,” said Celeste. “They are totally fucking.”

  “Carl?” Agnes said.

  “Carl is fucking everyone, basically.”

  “Not my mom,” said Patty.

  Celeste raised her eyebrows at Agnes.

  They walked again, in silence.

  Agnes felt a hand on her shoulder, and Celeste was there, in step and leaning in. “She must have had her reasons,” she said. She shrugged. “Right?”

  Agnes shrugged back. “She must have.”

  The Twins led Agnes to a place they called the Patch, a spot they had found with a nice view and a blanket of soft baby grasses. It was Madeline’s place, but the Twins didn’t know that and Agnes didn’t tell them. It would have grossed them out and they never would have returned. And Agnes thought Madeline might like some company.

  Jake was already there, reclining against a rock, the jackrabbit pillow she’d made him propping up his head. She smiled at this. Pillows were absurd out here, but so was he, in a way. His black jeans were shredded into rags at the bottom. But she remembered they’d been like that when she’d first seen him. It wasn’t hardship. It was style. His canvas high-tops were still perfectly folded over, and the white rubber toe was still white, even though he’d been walking in them for many, many, many seasons. His bangs were growing out quickly. Agnes would have to offer him another haircut again soon. She blushed.

  They weren’t supposed to use fur for superfluous things. It was supposed to be used only for warmth. For things like hats and mitten liners. Or to wrap around your neck or your middle on the coldest days. She’d caught the rabbit because it was lame, quaking under a sage. Alone. She’d lunged and caught it by the ears when it fled and tangled itself in the scrubby branches. It was too young to know how to get away. Agnes hated catching animals that way. It was unfair. She was a better hunter than that, and she believed they deserved the chance to be better animals. Also, it was against the rules to hunt young prey. But it appeared to have been abandoned by its mother and the rest of the litter. In that moment, catching it and breaking its neck swiftly felt much kinder than what it otherwise might go through.

  She should have donated the fur to the Community, and the meat too. But she’d kept both. She had told Jake that he should hide the pillow. It was nice to share a secret with him. It was nice, also, to break the rules with him. So he took it out only when away from camp. Only around her and the Twins. The pillow was soft, and she enjoyed watching him touch it to his cheek, or absentmindedly stroke it while he told her about something interesting he’d seen that day, or when he wanted to reminisce about the City, because, of all the Newcomers, he seemed to miss it the most.

  They sat in a circle and Jake dug into his bag. He pulled out a skin pouch, uncinched it, and handed it to Patty. “One piece each,” he reminded them.

  Patty pulled out a piece of rabbit jerky and passed it to Celeste.

  Celeste peered inside. “You took the biggest one,” she muttered. She chose one, scowling, and passed the bag to Agnes. When it returned to Jake, he counted what was left.

  “Four more pieces,” he said after taking his piece. “I think we should make more.”

  That lame rabbit had been the first. They’d caught two more and dried the meat, tanned the hides. The Twins now had secret pillows too. But they kept their secret pillows in a secret place.

  “Who wants to check the trap?” Jake asked as they chewed their jerky thoughtfully.

  Celeste said, “I’ll go.” She rose and disappeared into the thick bushes where they had set out the dead-drop trap Agnes had made from some branches and a flat rock.

  A few minutes later they heard a rustling and footsteps.

  “Did it catch?” Agnes called out.

  “Did what catch?”

  They all spun their heads toward the new voice.

  Bea emerged. “Did what catch?” she asked again, frowning, eyes piercing Agnes, as though she already knew the answer.

  Agnes mumbled, “Nothing.”

  “What are you doing here?” her mother asked, her voice a frightening mixture of calm and outrage.

  Agnes’s mouth dried up. Her mother looked around, her mouth screwing between anger and sorrow. Agnes followed her gaze and saw what her mother saw. Jake’s ridiculous shoes. The way Patty picked at the patches of her pants so that they would need to be sewn much sooner than if she’d just left them alone. Agnes saw how close she was sitting to Jake. How their butterflied knees touched. Agnes drew hers in, hugged them, and rocked. She tucked her lips into her mouth. Agnes saw her mother see how they lounged comfortably right where Madeline had been. Agnes might as well be lying on a pile of cleaned and bleached bones. She felt monstrous.

  “Answer me,” her mother said.

  “Nothing.”

  She saw her mother’s hand tremble as it lifted to wipe her brow and knead her eyes. She looked around again and focused on Jake. “What is that?”

  “A pillow,” he said.

  “Where did you get it?”

  He tipped his head at Agnes.

  “I made it for him,” said Agnes.

  “We don’t use fur for pillows, Agnes. You know that.”

  “But it was just one fur,” Agnes lied.

  “He can use skins like everyone else. If you want to do something nice, you can show him how you fold a skin to be like a pillow.”

  “You have a pillow,” Agnes said.

  “I had a pillow,” her mother corrected her. “I don’t anymore. And it wasn’t made at the expense of the Community.”

  “It caught!” Celeste came bounding out of the bushes with a jackrabbit by its ears. It kicked its legs as she skipped, swinging it like it was an extension of her arm. Its pelvis looked crushed, but it was still alive. When Celeste saw Bea, she stopped. She looked at the hare. It gave a plaintive cry to whatever hare friend might hear it.

  Her mother appraised Celeste, the hare, Agnes, her proximity to Jake, and Patty’s attempt to secretly chew jerky.

  “The pillow is one thing,” she said, “but really, Agnes. Rogue hunting? Keeping food from the Community? That is unacceptable.”

  “What do you care about the Community?” Agnes snapped, jumping to her feet. “Drinking your milk, breaking curfew. We were better off when we thought you were dead.”

  Somewhere Agnes heard a gasp. She was not sure where it came from, and wouldn’t have been surprised if it had come from her own dry throat.

  Her mother’s face arched in surprise. She slapped Agnes.

  The birds in the bushes were still and silent. Jake had leapt to his feet, but he stayed back.

  Her mother’s face was on fire. “You think because you lead our walks that makes you an adult. Ad
ults follow the rules or face the consequences. You’re still shielded from it all. I won’t always be able to protect you, Agnes.”

  Celeste snorted. “When did you ever protect her?” she said. “I’ve certainly never seen it.”

  “And just who the fuck are you?” spat Bea.

  Celeste clamped her mouth shut. She looked years younger than she was, like a child on the verge of blubbering. She broke the rabbit’s neck urgently, as though trying to reclaim some standing.

  “There are ways you can get in real trouble out here, Agnes,” her mother said. “This isn’t a game.”

  “I know that.”

  “Do you?” A worried look overcame her but was quickly replaced again with anger. What was she so angry about? She saw her mother eye the limp rabbit a split second before she swiped the rabbit from Celeste, leaving the girl’s hands empty, coated in clumps of fur.

  “This animal isn’t yours,” her mother said, shaking droplets of blood from the slack rabbit’s mouth at the Twins and Jake. “It belongs to everyone. And you—” She turned to Agnes, her eyes bloodshot. “This place,” she snarled, pointing to the ground, “isn’t yours either.”

  A ghostly feeling formed in Agnes’s gut. Something familiar but covered in cobwebs. She stomped her feet. Clenched her fists. “I hate you,” she said, forming each word into a hard stone that rolled off her tongue and dropped dead at her mother’s feet.

  Fleetingly, between postures, her mother gave herself away, slumping more desperately than anything Agnes had seen. Their eyes briefly met. Her mother’s held a question, one as desperate as her stance, as needful and longing-filled. Then, like in an eclipse, that vulnerable look was blacked out by one that was hard, intimidating, unloving.

  She turned away, throwing that new strange laugh of hers over her shoulder at Agnes. “Of course you hate me,” she barked. “I’m your mother.” With the rabbit flapping against her thigh, leaving blood splats behind, she disappeared back into the brush. She became untouchable again.

  * * *

  As Agnes approached bed that night, she found Glen lying stiffly in the skins. Her mother lay next to him. Their hands touched, index fingers hooked to each other, but no other part of them made contact along their length. They stared up into the sky as though paralyzed, comatose, dead. But when Agnes stood over them, Glen smiled with great effort, his eyes red-rimmed. Her mother’s smile was taut and unwelcoming. Still, Glen and her mother scooted apart and made room for her in between them. She didn’t understand.

  “Come lie down here for the night,” Glen said.

  Her mother had scooted almost all the way off the bed. Probably so she would be as far from me as possible, Agnes thought.

  Agnes lay between them. Her mother and Glen held hands over her. Her mother was fidgety, picking at Glen’s fingers with hers, as though preoccupied, or nervous. Agnes wondered if it had to do with what she had said to her. She had never said it before. She didn’t really hate her mother. Yet her mother had laughed it off. She seemed to expect it.

  Agnes turned to her mother slightly. She remembered then how she had often crept into her mother’s room in the early dawn. Agnes woke up too early, before the sun was even lightening the sky, but her body, her mind, wouldn’t let her fall back to sleep. Her mother would be asleep in her bed on her side. Always open to her, even in sleep. Agnes would curl into her, and her mother’s arm would automatically envelop her. And like that, Agnes could doze again until her mother’s alarm buzzed.

  Agnes scooted toward her mother, but her mother turned away. Her body tense, a barrier, a wall. Glen tried to pull Agnes back, but she reached out, clasped her mother’s shoulder, and tried to roll her back.

  “I’m sorry, Mama,” she whispered, trying to get closer, rooting into her neck, her soft cheek.

  But her mother was now rolling away and was up, up to her feet. Quiet like an animal.

  Agnes sat up. Glen tried to pull her back down.

  “Back to sleep,” he sang anxiously.

  But she jerked her arm away.

  Her mother was slinking across the circle of beds. She stopped at Carl and Val’s bed, then crawled under the hide with them. The firelight flickered over them. Around the circle of beds, eyes peered, curious. A moment later, a confused moan, and then a still sleeping Val rolled out from the skins onto the cold dirt. From her sleep, Val clawed at the air, then awoke fully, became alert and reached toward them, for Carl, under the skins. But Bea emerged again, drew her fist back, and struck Val’s face. Agnes heard the crunch of bones. Heard Val’s cry of pain. Heard the Community’s quiet gasps around the sleep circle. Val clasped her nose, but her mother pried Val’s hand away and punched her again. And again. Val screamed and howled, then gurgling, turned away. She curled, hand to her face, wheezing through a mangled nose.

  Agnes saw her mother use her leg to shove Val’s balled-up body away from the bed and farther out into the uncertain glow of the half-moon.

  Under where her mother now lay with Carl, there was some commotion, some wrestling; then Agnes heard unmistakable sounds. Animal sounds. Something she’d seen countless times in the wild but couldn’t reconcile with the vision before her. Her mother on top of Carl, bucking as though on horseback. This normal act of life she thought she had figured out becoming strange again. She felt indignant. Around the circle, people brazenly watched the spectacle. Val howled with rage as she crawled away, grabbing Dr. Harold’s pelt from his bed, dragging it with her. He let her have it.

  Agnes finally wrung the shock from her eyes and sprang up. To stop her mother. To demand an explanation. To punish her. To console Val. To harm Carl. She didn’t know what feeling was strongest. But as she rose, a hand clasped her arm and roughly pulled her back down. It was Glen.

  “Stay here,” he said.

  “But Glen—”

  “Stay here,” he hissed. His grip felt like a shackle.

  “But—”

  Before she could say another word, he covered her mouth. She felt him quivering, overcome with some emotion. Anger. Sadness. She couldn’t tell. She’d never seen him overcome with either.

  “It’s okay,” he said. His voice came from deep in the reeds of his throat.

  She thought of her fight with her mother earlier. Of her mother’s defeated posture before her knowing laugh. Agnes hadn’t spoken to her for the rest of the day. At dinner, her mother had kept her distance. Made small talk with everyone, all the people she used to not spare a thought for. She’d seen her mother throw her head back and laugh at something Dr. Harold had said. Dr. Harold of all people. Then her mother had settled to eat her ration next to Carl. They had huddled strangely close, whispered intensely under the usually light dinner-time chatter. Their conversation serious, sometimes heated. So, so, so close.

  Agnes shook her head, trying to dislodge the image, let it fall to the dirt. She felt ill.

  “Glen, this is my fault,” she said.

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “We had a fight.”

  “This isn’t your fault,” Glen said. “You can’t understand it now, but I promise you it isn’t your fault.”

  She was so tired of not understanding. To not know how it worked made her feel estranged from the world.

  Glen didn’t say more. He squeezed his eyes shut and started to hum. He leaned closer and hummed in Agnes’s ear, and it filled her up with a song that was familiar to her even though it wasn’t something that Debra or Juan sang around the fire. It wasn’t a song Patty, Celeste, and Jake had tried to tell her about when they talked about all the music they missed. It was something she remembered from when she was younger. When she was sick. A song that floated in under her closed door. A song Glen and her mother listened to on nights when they finished a bottle of wine together. When the sound of silverware clinking against the dinner plates sounded to her like a faint bell signaling the start of something. He hummed it into her ear and covered her other ear with his warm hand. And she was back in her bed, on the mattr
ess that held a small imprint of her because she’d lain on it so much of her short life, back in a place where she had been worse than unwell, but where, she thought, she had been happy.

  She squeezed her eyes shut too and her lashes collected hot tears.

  Earlier that day, after the slap, after the rabbit, Jake had asked Agnes what her mother’s name was.

  “Why are you asking me that?” A mote of dread had deepened within Agnes. She didn’t want to think about her mother.

  “Because I’ve noticed no one—none of us new people, that is—calls her by her name. We all just call her your mom. Agnes’s mom.”

  “Then call her that,” Agnes had said angrily, not thinking it could mean anything.

  Now, even with eyes clenched and ears covered, Agnes could feel the tension around the fire. The stillness from ears perked and listening to the gripping rhythm of bodies, of Carl calling out “Bea,” and a sound that must have been from her mother—a grunt that sounded like it came from behind clenched teeth. Everyone wanting to be alert when something big took place, when the world as they knew it changed. Even the deer that munched dewy grass on the outskirts of the camp were listening. They bleated to their young, to their mates, to make sure they were there and safe. Then they snorted out into the night beyond their sight, Friend or foe? Friend or foe? to warn off the unwelcome. In the distance Agnes was certain she heard the wolves howl back. Foe.

  The Newcomers had called this stranger who’d walked in from the desert Agnes’s mom because that’s how she had let herself be introduced.

  They knew her name now.

  Part VI

  To the Caldera

  They were waiting for the Gatherers to come back from the mountains with the pine nut harvest when a lone Ranger appeared on horseback.

  They hadn’t seen a Ranger in three winters. Maybe four. Somehow Agnes could still remember that counting winters was the same as counting years, but she was no longer sure how many had passed. Things had changed since Bea and Carl began leading. Winters were milder. Fire season was longer. Water was becoming harder to find. They spent less time in the mountains. After their last Big Walk, Bea and Carl had refused to do a cross-map migration as in seasons before. Instead, they kept the Community confined to one expansive basin surrounded by small ranges. The Basin was nice enough. It had what they needed. It wasn’t beautiful exactly, but they found great comfort there. They landed in the same place twice. Three times. Five times. They hovered. Once they’d found the Basin, they just kept moving around it without ever really leaving.