“A painting?” Frida said.
“Yeah,” he said. “More than one. They’re of”—he didn’t want to say the word, but he had to; there wasn’t a way around it—“they’re of terrorists. From Germany. In the 1970s.” He paused. “We were into them at Plank,” he said.
He thought his voice sounded innocent, like he was just talking about some random artist, but Frida sat up immediately. She was pulling on her T-shirt.
“Why are you thinking about that?” she said.
So she knew he was talking about Micah. Micah must have talked about those paintings with her, too.
They tried not to bring up her brother. They’d agreed to never tell anyone out here about him, and even between them, both his death and his life were difficult subjects, so thorny they could cut themselves on his name.
If Cal told her Micah had liked the paintings back when they were at Plank, she’d freak out. In the world according to Frida, her brother had been a precocious boy and then a brilliant man, faultless until the Group got ahold of him. According to her, Micah never would have said such a thing before he became involved with them.
“It’s nothing,” Cal said now. He tried to pull Frida back, but she was already slipping out of his grasp. She crawled over him to get out of the bed. He couldn’t help but look at her nipples. There they were.
“Babe,” he said, sitting up. “Why are you so mad?”
“Please, don’t,” she said. She put on her pants.
“I’m going to the well,” she said. She was already pulling on a sweater, her boots.
“Frida—”
But she was opening the door, the morning light spilling into the house, falling across all its dusty surfaces, its sad furniture. It was ugly; Frida had been right.
Cal called her name, but only after the door had slammed behind her.
3
Frida was chopping beets for dinner when she heard the crack of twigs and the rustle of trees and, after that, an animal’s hooves against the hard dirt of the path to their house. She could just barely make out August’s whistling, and then he stopped to mutter something. It sounded soothing, and she knew he was talking to the animal, Sue, probably congratulating her on another safe arrival.
Frida put down her knife and turned to Cal. They hadn’t spoken much beyond the necessary all day. She wasn’t sure why she was mad, and at whom, even. Her husband had brought up something stupid, something from a long time ago. It shouldn’t matter now, but it did.
They didn’t talk about Micah because, when they did, Cal got pissed and Frida got sad, and everything miserable about the world wedged itself between them. Frida knew what her brother had done; she had accepted it; she wasn’t in denial. But sometimes, the Micah that Cal remembered had not a lick of goodness in him. That dumb college kid who had once been into Gerhard Richter and other pretentious shit? That was her little brother. Whatever else he was, well, it didn’t erase that fact.
Cal probably wouldn’t bring up her family now, not for weeks. He’d be afraid that if he did, she’d fall into a grief spiral. As if never mentioning her brother or her parents made her longing for them disappear. As if he could will all that pain away.
Cal was sprawled across one of the couches, an arm slung over his eyes. He was thinking. This was an actual activity they did now—just lay down and let their minds wander. Sometimes they gave each other a term to meditate on: Magic Marker, air conditioner, strawberry. It was more entertaining than Frida would have ever imagined it to be. Sandy Miller had told her about it. She and Bo used to do it, before they had kids. “Jane and Garrett keep us busy,” she’d said. That made sense now: parenting as a way to kill time.
“He’s here,” Frida said, and Cal moved his arm off his face, sat up. “Get your foraging gear and meet him on your way out.”
“You can hear him? Your ears are as good as a dog’s.” He grinned, his version of an olive branch.
“Hurry,” she said.
Frida dried her hands and placed the beets in one of the metal bowls. With a little dried mint, they would be all right for dinner.
She heard August greet Cal. After a few moments, Cal yelled her name, and she headed outside.