Hours into their journey, Frida remembered something her mother had told her when she was a teenager. “I felt so confident when I was pregnant with you,” Hilda had said. “And then it happened again, with Micah.” She’d gone on to describe a peculiar peace that descended upon her with each pregnancy. As if, along with the necessary hormones and the double volume of blood swimming through her veins, a mother-to-be produced a reserve of courage for the life to come. Even na?veté could have a purpose. It was a survival skill, the same one that made a woman forget the pain of childbirth soon after it happened, so that she’d be willing to do it again someday. The species had to continue, didn’t it?
Maybe Frida was feeling what Hilda had described. How else to explain how easily she pushed through these foreign woods, as if she would never be afraid again. She gave a secret nod to the coyote, hoped he’d eaten his kill and had taken a long nap after she’d run from him. Frida hadn’t told Cal about the coyote, and she wasn’t planning to. She deserved another secret from him. It evened the score.
At dusk they tucked themselves into what must have been a campsite for August and his carriage. It was a clearing just big enough to set up a tent and let the mare rest, drink water from one of the many nearby streams, maybe eat a bucket of oats. Was that what mules ate? Frida had wondered before where August had procured his animal, and if it slept in a stable somewhere, if it was offered a modicum of comfort and safety after each journey. Maybe Frida would finally find out.
Cal made a small fire while Frida unpacked their bedding and pulled out provisions for dinner. At the bottom of her backpack, rolled in a sweatshirt, nestled the turkey baster. She’d nearly forgotten about it. Her contraband.
She’d pulled it from the other artifacts after Cal had told her everything, and after she’d banished him from the house. She’d told him she needed to be alone to think, that he didn’t deserve to share a home with her. Once she was alone, the plan was already sprouting in her mind: they would go find these people, and she’d offer the baster as a gift. This was how disparate civilizations were supposed to interact, wasn’t it?
She hadn’t told Cal about her idea. It was another secret she deserved.
She still had trouble believing that, for months, Cal had known about the insidious Spikes, had known that August traded with the people beyond them. Since hearing Bo’s story, Cal must have conjectured about August. He might be from the Spikes himself, or he might be their leader. Cal must have reconsidered the Millers’ death, too: Had these strangers wanted their friends dead? And why?
This is what hurt Frida the most: that her husband had bounced these ideas off the wall of his mind like the only child he was—alone, without anyone’s input. He’d played with that tennis ball by himself, and he’d scuffed the same place on the wall again and again without any progress or relief. He’d acted as if Frida weren’t there to help, or as if he wished she weren’t.
They’d moved in together a few months after they began dating. It was a decrepit studio apartment in Hollywood, with a Murphy bed that came out of the wall. Their neighbors were either elderly or junkies, or both, always loitering out front or arguing with one another in the parking lot, and Frida and Cal would hole up in their place, lock the deadbolt, and tell each other about their lives.
Frida had told him how it felt to see her mother cry when Micah left for Plank. How she knew she’d never be enough for her parents. How neither of them expected much of her, how they believed her baking was silly—a stoner’s hobby—and how, secretly, she agreed with them.
And Cal had told her how he couldn’t stand to go back to Cleveland, even after they were allowing families of the deceased into the broken city, even though there was land that belonged to him. He didn’t have the guts, he said. There were the Plank Chronicles, too. She could have recited the names of the animals there, the chores he did, the classes he took. He told her of his desire to carry the school’s idealism into a world that maybe didn’t deserve it.
Even though she knew it was arrogant to think this made them different from any other couple falling in love, Frida had believed that what they’d shared was more than what other couples gave each other.
But, now, she realized how silly she had been. She understood that these confessions, these stories about the past, were a rite of passage for any couple, clichéd but crucial, necessary to their survival. If she’d been with other men before Cal—not random one-night stands, or ongoing trysts with deli busboys, but real relationships—she might have known this.
She would have understood, too, that all the talking in the world couldn’t give everything away, that a person was always capable of keeping secrets. It might have saved her from feeling betrayed by her husband here at the end of the world.