1503951243 (35 page)

Sally stared into the void. She felt Dix, on the other side of the trunk, doing the same. It seemed there should have been more. She didn’t know what sort of more she wanted, but something. The whole scene had transpired in minutes. Darius didn’t resist. The baby didn’t even cry. And yet, everything was suddenly, dramatically different. She let her binoculars fall to her chest. Dix did the same.

“She’s safe now?” he whispered.

“Yes, Dix. Yes, she is.”

He cried then. Sally could feel it—the regular, gentle vibration as the tree shook in solidarity with his sobs. It didn’t last long. One sustained spasm of grief and relief. Once he had composed himself, they climbed down. Dix helped Sally through the awkward process, showing her where to grab hold, taking her foot and placing it on a branch, supporting her with a palm on her back. When they were on solid ground again, he retrieved the cup she had dropped and left behind the granola bar for the squirrels but took the wrapper. They found the trail and started back, now walking slowly in the filtered light and warm breeze of a bright summer’s morning. There was no hurry, nowhere either of them needed to be. They were unburdened. They had set everything in motion, and now other people were taking care of all that had been weighing on them.

They walked as if in a daze. All the stress and anticipation had left them both, a rush of water down a drain. The amped-up emotions would return, they both knew. The world of lawyers and court cases was waiting for them. But for now, for this brief interlude, they were simply two people on a walk in the woods. Sally watched as Dix stopped and squatted from time to time to examine something near or in the trail. He picked apart bear scat and owl pellets. He pointed out faint deer tracks and ginseng patches. He named the trees and mushrooms, the birds that flittered past and the ones that beat their bills against a tree.

“Guess dealers pay good money for these wild things now,” he said. “Mushrooms. Ginseng. Sell them to restaurants.”

“Foraged,” Sally said. “That’s what they call it now, right?”

Dix nodded.

“Another one of those words from away,” she said. “We always just called it picking berries.”

“Yep. If those downstate diners knew some redneck collected this stuff in a dirty old basket, the chefs couldn’t charge extra for it.
Foraged
sounds so much more romantic, you know?” Dix said. “Kind of like using the word
cabin
for some three-thousand-square-foot, totally decked-out second home with every modern convenience.”

“Right. No single-room shack in the woods held together with roofing nails, filled with beer cans and cigarette butts, smelling of sweat, wood smoke, and animal blood.”

“You’re a local, then?” Dix asked, recognizing how much was already, natively understood between them.

Sally said the name of a town that was also that of a prison.

“Guard?”

She nodded, answering his question of what her father did for a living. As if there was anything else her father might have done in that place.

“Disability now. For a long time,” she added.

Dix sighed, and in that exhalation she heard sympathy—for her and also for all those people in this part of the world who relied on “the system” to stay alive.

They walked on. The light slanted through the dark branches and green leaves. Sally took in the layers of mature evergreens and deciduous trees, the smaller shrubs and young, spindly saplings reaching toward the intermittent patches of sun. She inhaled the damp, tangy smell of decay. She listened to some animal chattering up in the canopy. She heard a long, plaintive bird call. She realized that the bulk of her life had been spent experiencing the woods from the road and the inside of her car. She had seen them as little more than a wall of trees that hemmed her in on her way to somewhere else and occasionally jettisoned a frantic squirrel or startled deer into her path. She had never tried to experience, much less enjoy, the mountains that surrounded her as a park, a place of beauty and recreation. That was all for rich visitors and tourists. To the people she knew, the woods were a place to hunt, trap, fish, snowmobile, or avoid. She did none of the former, so instead she did the latter. Maybe this was something else she could change. Maybe, these woods could be something she could take some time to enjoy. Like Dix did. Dix, who was clearly as comfortable in the mountains as in his own backyard, was stopped in the path up ahead, adjusting his boot laces.

Waiting for me,
Sally thought.
Giving me a rest. A polite man. A nice man. What a concept.

“You from around here?” she asked when she caught up.

“Yup,” Dix replied. “Dad’s side’s been here for generations. Mom was from away. They met in architecture school.”

“Architects.” Sally tested the word. “I’ve never met an architect. Where’d you go to school?”

Dix looked mildly amused at Sally’s question. She figured most people he encountered assumed he hadn’t gone to college. At least most people from away.

“Started at Paul Smith’s. In forestry. Finished at St. Lawrence in environmental studies. You?”

“Plattsburgh State.”

Sally knew she and Dix were filling in worlds of information about each other. She, blue collar, state school, state job. He, professional parents, private college, self-employed. But they were both locals, shaped by the land and the weather, the people and their pervasive view that life was pretty much just a long, hard slog.

They began to trade stories that had recently been in the news—or just in the air. There was the man who had allegedly offered a woman he befriended at a bar his life insurance policy if she helped him commit suicide by driving over him in his car. Which she did, and got jail time instead of an inheritance. The contractor hired to do some grading work at the cemetery who got drunk, climbed in the tractor in the dark, and pushed several dozen headstones over a cliff and into the river before rolling the machine over on himself, crawling out, falling asleep in the grass, and waking up with no injuries save a bad hangover. The young man who beat his wife to death and was pulled over for a broken taillight by police who found her corpse, three young children, and a litter of puppies in the car. The café owner who drank all night from her own bar. The pancake breakfast fund-raiser that raised $2,500 for the local girl without health insurance who got internal injuries and a leg broken in several places when she crashed her ATV, and how small a dent that would make in her six-figure hospital bills. The need for volunteer firefighters and medics. The closing of the post office.

All the talk of local tragedies seemed to remind Dix of something.

“What about those rape charges against Darius?” he asked Sally. “Do you know anything about that?”

“Yeah. That was Cassandra, the meth head,” Sally said. “Turns out, sadly, I know that girl. And her entire fucked-up family. Of course her name isn’t really Cassandra. I hadn’t seen her for a long time. She’d changed a lot. Aged a lot. Meth will do that to you. It was her daddy who got her pregnant. Mother denied it, said the girl was making it all up, and Dad acted like it was no big deal. Said his daddy had done the same to his sister. That’s why they dropped the charges. After the story came out, the father disappeared. The rest of them—alcoholic mother, junkie brother, and mentally challenged baby—moved up to Plattsburgh. Living in some old motel converted to Section 8 housing. All part of the system, now.”

Dix sucked his teeth. “American Dream,” he said.

“White-trash version.”

They popped out of the woods and into Dix’s yard. They stood blinking in the high midday light.

“Sally,” Dix said, his voice quiet, “once you get the all-clear, once the police tape comes down, can I come out there with you? I’d like to see it again. See where—”

Sally stopped him by putting a hand on his arm.

“I’ll call you. I promise. First thing.”

They nodded at each other. It was time to go. It was time to get ready for whatever was coming next.

Dix stood in the doorway to the room his mother had always referred to as the guest room. The walls were painted a soft green, the underside of a leaf. Plaid curtains in subtle shades of lichen and pumpkin hung in the windows. There were twin beds covered with laundered-soft chenille spreads. There were pillows in the same fabric as the curtains. An antique desk with a needlepointed chair. A closet with only a few empty hangers. His mother loved the sight of those twin beds, he remembered. They always brought a smile to her face. They must have seemed full of hope to her. Hope for good company. And, it occurred to him, probably for grandchildren.

He thought of Miranda. She seemed so far away, as though their time together had been a decade ago. He was surprised by how few actual memories he had of her. She was more of an idea than a person. Already. And yet. They had a daughter.

Dix had never changed a diaper or held an infant. He’d never soothed a crying baby. He’d never bandaged a scraped knee or helped a kid with homework. The previous night, after dinner, in those dark hours when insomnia kept him awake, when other men might be furtively turning on their computers to look at porn, he hunted the Internet for information about babies’ developmental stages and key parenting tasks. He fretted over car seats and Montessori education, vaccinations and bullying, summer camps and cloth versus disposable. He finally went to sleep and dreamed that the dog lying next to him was instead a wild, woods-reared and fur-covered child who didn’t understand a word he said. He woke up frightened that before he even got a chance to try being a father, he was going to fuck it all up. He was scared that he already had.

He wished his mother was there to help him. It crossed his mind that Sally, with all her rough pragmatism and coarse good humor, would be good counsel and company for this chore. He noted, without sadness or remorse, that he was not wishing Miranda was there. Then he’d have her to take care of, as well as all this. It was a harsh, cold thought, but it was also true. She should be there. He recognized that. But he had grieved for her as much as was possible. That job was done. He had other jobs to do now.

He was reluctant to disturb the room. Doing so would disturb his mother’s memory but also disturb fate. What if, in spite of everything, this room was never filled with a crying or laughing or sleeping child?

Platitudes filled his head. Get your house in order. Be in a position to succeed. You’ll rise to the occasion.

He’d rather clean out two decades of compacted manure from an old barn than do this. Cleaning out a barn was something he knew how to do.

He stepped over the threshold. He began by taking down the curtains—they seemed too adult and tailored for a little girl’s room. He rubbed a cloth over the sills and removed the fine dust of disuse. He wiped the glass with vinegar and water. The light that came through the sparkling windows was a soft caress. There was nothing to hide from in here. Maybe he didn’t need curtains at all. He calculated where he’d put a changing table, small dresser, and crib once the beds were moved out. For now he’d put them in the back bedroom, his old room, where he used to sleep with his feet sticking out from under the blankets; that room was now empty of everything but camping gear. There was space in there. Maybe his daughter would like the twin beds. Someday. When she was old enough. When she wanted to have a friend over to spend the night. As impossible and improbable as that seemed now. Dix pulled back the bedspreads, folded them, placed them in the linen closet. He stripped each bed of its musty, unlaundered-for-years sheets and threw them in a pile next to the washing machine. He then picked up a pillow but immediately dropped it back onto the bare bed, as if he’d been burned.

He watched for what he had felt inside the stuffing, and eventually the pillow began to move of its own accord, throbbing and pulsating. He placed his hand gently on its taut surface and felt the life squirming within. He went to the kitchen, found a scissors and a small basket, returned to the guest room—the baby’s room, his daughter’s room—and gently split open the skin of the pillow. The white stuffing, released from its container, spilled apart, revealing at its center a gray field mouse with a cluster of pink pups at her teats. Dix used both hands to gently scoop all of them and a generous amount of pillow filling into the basket. Then he took the whole family to a protected corner of his wood shop and tucked them on a shelf behind a box of spare tractor parts and a bucket that held his tree-climbing harness. He grabbed a palm full of birdseed from the can where he kept it locked up from the raccoons and spread it out near the basket.