“Help me with these,” she said. She was still shaking.
“Sure thing.” Cal grabbed the coiled rope hanging from the side of the house, stretched it to the tree across the yard, and hooked it. He kept looking back at her as he did so, as if trying to figure out what was different about her, as if she’d just returned from the beauty parlor.
“Are you all right?” he asked, when they were side by side at the line.
“No,” she said.
“Please don’t tell me you’re still pissed at me.”
Frida shook her head. “It’s not that. Just now, after I finished the clothes, I went into the forest.”
“You did what?”
“We need to find other people. They’re nearby, I know it.”
He didn’t answer.
She squeezed his hand, hard. “Don’t lie to me.”
“Why are you being so careless?” he asked.
“Why are you being so duplicitous?”
He smirked. “Good word.”
“I’m pregnant, Cal.”
“So now you’re sure about that.”
“Would you rather I be sick?” She let go of his hand and pulled one of Sandy’s old dresses from the laundry bag. It was wrinkled and cold.
He pulled it away from her. “Let me,” he said.
“Just tell me what you know.”
Cal closed his eyes, the dress in his hands. She could tell by the way his face scrunched up that she almost had him, that he’d do exactly what she asked. He wanted to tell her.
He almost dropped the dress, but she grabbed it. “I just washed this,” she whispered. “Please don’t get it dirty.”
“I should have told you as soon as Bo told me,” Cal said.
“What do you mean?” Frida thought of the coyote and the animal it had killed.
“Let’s go inside,” Cal said, and put a hand on her lower back.
6
They had packed two bags. Cal carried the larger camping backpack, and Frida had Bo’s rucksack. Rucksack: that was Bo’s word, and Frida said it made her think of a rugged country place, where men wore cowboy hats and called grown women gals. The rucksack was olive colored and dusty. After an hour, she said its straps bit into her shoulders, but she refused to let Cal carry it for her. She was trying to be tough.
If Bo was right, it would take two days to get to the fabled Spikes. They had agreed to get as far as they could the first day and get moving again early the second day, so as to arrive at the Spikes with the threat of darkness still hours away. They had the extra-large sleeping bag, and more than enough food, and even the flashlight, which Cal tried to convince himself they would only use if they had to. He doubted they’d be so disciplined. They’d both grown a little spoiled since moving into the Miller Estate.
Frida had been angry when he finally told her the truth. “How could you have withheld so much from me?” she’d yelled. But once they’d decided to go, she’d taken his hand and smiled, relief in her eyes. “We’ve got a plan,” she’d said. That wasn’t really true, though they did have a goal: they would present themselves to these strangers, these people who believed in containment. “And then what?” Cal wanted to know. Frida had no answer. Whatever happened, they would at least know who and what was beyond their land. She needed that, she said, and so did he.
For the trip, Cal was wearing Garrett’s Official Pussy Inspector T-shirt. Frida had tossed it to him that morning when he was getting dressed. He’d laughed at first, and then, when he saw that she wasn’t kidding, shook his head, which meant, he supposed, I won’t wear a dead boy’s clothes.
“If they ever spied on the Millers, they’ll recognize it,” she said. “At the very least they’ll laugh. Anyway, you have to. It’s your punishment.”
She’d kept a straight face, but, later, when Cal shrugged the camping pack onto his back, Frida had barely managed to contain her laughter.
“That stupid T-shirt,” she said. “Serves you right.”
Before they left, he’d placed a hand on the front door and said a childish little prayer in his head, maybe to the house itself—Please keep us safe. We’ll be back soon. Should he put his palms together, he thought, kneel by a bed? No need. The words alone comforted him, or just one of them: Please. He wanted to return to their little plot of land as soon as possible. The problem was Frida hoped to stay away for as long as they could manage. It was why, he realized, he’d taken so long to tell her the truth.