4
Theresa watched the second hand pass the 12.
3:20 p.m.
She tidied up the items on her smooth, clean desk and gathered her purse.
The brick walls of the office were papered with real estate brochures that few people had ever studied. She had rarely used the typewriter or received a phone call. For the most part, she read books all day, thought about her family, and occasionally her life before.
Since her arrival in Pines, she had wondered if this was her afterlife. At the very least, it was her life after.
After Seattle.
After her job as a paralegal.
After almost all of her relationships.
After living in a free world, that for all its complexities and tragedies still made sense.
But in her five years here, she had aged, and so had others. People had died, disappeared, been murdered. Babies had been born. That didn’t align with any concept of an afterlife she had heard of, but then again, by definition, how could you ever know what to expect outside the realm of the living, breathing human experience?
Over the years of her residency, it had steadily dawned on her that Pines felt much closer to a prison than any afterlife, although perhaps there was no meaningful distinction.
A mysterious and beautiful lifelong sentence.
It wasn’t just a physical confinement, but a mental one as well, and it was the mental aspect that made it feel like a stint in solitary. The inability to outwardly acknowledge one’s past or thoughts or fears. The inability to truly connect with a single human being. There were moments of course. Few and far between. Sustained eye contact, even with a stranger, when the intensity seemed to suggest the inner turmoil.
Fear.
Despair.
Confusion.
Those times, Theresa at least felt the warmth of humanity, of not being so utterly and helplessly alone. It was the fakeness that killed her. The forced conversations about the weather. About the latest crop from the gardens. Why the milk was late. About everything surface and nothing real. In Pines, it was only ever small talk, and getting accustomed to that level of interaction had been one of the toughest hurdles to her integration.
But every fourth Thursday, she got to leave work early, and for a brief window, the rules let up.
Theresa locked the door behind her and set off down the sidewalk.
It was a quiet afternoon, but that was nothing new.
There were never loud ones.
She walked south along Main Street. The sky was a staggering, cloudless blue. There was no wind. No cars. She didn’t know what month it was—only time and days of the week were counted—but it felt like late August or early September. A transitional quality to the light that hinted at the death of a season.
The air mild with summer, the light gold with fall.
And the aspen on the cusp of turning.
The lobby of the hospital was empty.
Theresa took the elevator to the third floor, stepped out into the hallway, checked the time.
3:29.
The corridor was long.
Fluorescent lights hummed above the checkerboard floor. Theresa walked halfway down until she reached the chair sitting outside a closed, unmarked door.
She took a seat.
The noise of the lights seemed to get louder the longer she waited.
The door beside her opened.
A woman emerged and smiled down at her. She had perfect white teeth and a face that struck Theresa as both beautiful and remote. Unknowable. Her eyes were greener than Theresa’s, and she’d pulled her hair back into a ponytail.
Theresa said, “Hi, Pam.”
“Hello, Theresa. Why don’t you come on in?”
The room was bland and sterile.
White walls absent any painting or photograph.
Just a chair, a desk, a leather divan.
“Please,” Pam said in a soothing voice that sounded vaguely robotic, gesturing for Theresa to lie down.
Theresa stretched out on the divan.
Pam took a seat in the chair and crossed her legs. She wore a white lab coat over a gray skirt and black-rimmed glasses.
She said, “It’s good to see you again, Theresa.”
“You too.”
“How have you been?”
“Okay, I guess.”
“I believe this is the first time you’ve come to see me since your husband’s return.”
“That’s true.”
“Must be so good to have him back.”
“It’s amazing.”
Pam slid the pen out of her lapel pocket and clicked out the tip. She turned her swivel chair toward the desk, put the pen to a legal pad with Theresa’s name scrawled across the top, and said, “Do I hear a but coming?”
“No, it’s just that it’s been five years. A lot has happened.”
“And now it feels like you’re married to a stranger?”
“We’re rusty. Awkward. And of course, it’s not like we can just sit down and talk about Pines. About this insane situation we’re in. He’s thrown back into my life and we’re expected to function like a perfect family unit.”
Pam scribbled on the pad.
“How would you say Ethan is adapting?”
“To me?”
“To you. Ben. His new job. Everything.”
“I don’t know. Like I said, it’s not like we can communicate. You’re the only person I’m allowed to really talk to.”
“Fair enough.”
Pam faced Theresa again. “Do you find yourself wondering what he knows?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know exactly what I mean. Ethan was the subject of a fête, and the only person in the history of Pines to escape one. Do you wonder if he made it out of town? What he saw? Why he returned?”
“But I would never ask him.”
“But you wonder.”
“Of course I do. It’s like he died and came back to life. He has answers to questions that haunt me. But I would never ask him.”
“Have you and Ethan been intimate yet?”
Theresa felt a deep blush flooding through her face as she stared up at the ceiling.
“Yes.”
“How many times?”
“Three.”
“How was it?”
None of your fucking business.
But she said, “The first two times were a little clunky. Yesterday was far and away the best.”
“Did you come?”
“Excuse me?”
“There’s nothing to be ashamed of, Theresa. Your ability or lack thereof to have an orgasm is a reflection on your state of mind.” Pam smirked. “And possibly Ethan’s skills. As your psychiatrist, I need to know.”
“Yes.”
“Yes, you had one?”
“Yesterday, I did.”
Theresa watched Pam draw an O with a smiley face beside it.
“I worry about him,” Theresa said.
“Your husband?”
“He went out in the middle of the night last night. Didn’t come back until dawn. I don’t know where he went. I can’t ask. I get that. I assume he was chasing someone trying to leave.”
“Do you ever have thoughts about leaving?”
“Not in several years.”
“Why is that?”
“At first, I wanted to. I felt like I was still living in the old world. Like this was a prison or an experiment. But it’s strange—the longer I stayed here, the more it became normal.”
“What did?”
“Not knowing why I was here. What this town really was. What was beyond.”
“And why do you think it became more normal to you?”
“Maybe this is just me adapting or giving in, but I realized that as strange as this town was, it wasn’t all that different from my life before. Not when I really held them up against each other. Most interaction in the old world was shallow and superficial. My job in Seattle was as a paralegal working for an insurance defense firm. Helping insurance companies fuck people out of their coverage. Here, I sit in an office all day long and hardly talk to anyone. Equally useless jobs, but at least this one isn’t actively hurting people. The old world was filled with mysteries beyond my understanding—the universe, God, what happens when we die. And there are plenty of mysteries here. Same dynamics. Same human frailties. It just all happens to exist in this little valley.”
“So you’re saying it’s all relative.”
“Maybe.”
“Do you believe this is the afterlife, Theresa?”
“I don’t even know what that means. Do you?”
Pam just smiled. It was a facade, no comfort in it. Pure mask. The thought crossed Theresa’s mind, and not for the first time—who is this woman I’m spilling all my secrets to? To some extent, the exposure was terrifying. But the compulsion to actually connect with another human being tipped the scales.
Theresa said, “I guess I just see Pines as a new phase of my life.”
“What’s the hardest thing about it?”
“About what? Living here?”
“Yeah.”
“Hope.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Why am I continuing to breathe in and out? I would think that’s the hardest question for everyone stuck in this place to answer.”
“And how do you answer it, Theresa?”
“My son. Ethan. Finding a great book. Snowstorms. But it’s not like my old life. There’s no dream house to live for. No lottery. I used to fantasize about going to law school and starting my own practice. Becoming fulfilled and rich. Retiring with Ethan somewhere warm with a clear blue sea and white sand. Where it never rains.”
“And your son?”
Theresa hadn’t seen it coming. Those three little words hit her with the sneaky power of a surprise right.
The ceiling she’d been staring at disappeared behind a sheet of tears.
“Ben’s future was your biggest hope, right?” Pam asked.
Theresa nodded, and when she blinked, two lines of saltwater ran out of the corners of her eyes and down her face.
“His wedding?” Pam asked.
“Yeah.”
“An illustrious career that made him happy and you proud?”
“It’s more than that.”
“What?”
“It’s what I was just talking about. Hope. I want it so badly for him, but he’ll never know it. What can the children of Pines aspire to be? What foreign lands do they dream of visiting?”
“Have you considered that maybe this idea of hope, at least the way that you conceive of it, is a holdover from your past life, that serves no purpose?”
“You’re saying abandon hope all ye who enter here?”
“No, I’m saying live in the moment. That maybe in Pines there’s joy to be had in just surviving. That you continue to breathe in and out because you can breathe in and out. Love the simple things you experience every day. All this natural beauty. The sound of your son’s voice. Ben will grow up to live a happy life here.”
“How?”
“Has it occurred to you that your son may no longer share your old-world concept of happiness? That he’s growing up in a town that cultivates exactly the sort of in-the-moment living I just described?”
“It’s just so insular.”
“So take him and leave.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes.”
“We’d be killed.”
“But you might escape. Some have left, though they’ve never returned. Do you secretly fear that, as bad as you think it is in Pines, it could be a million times worse on the outside?”
Theresa wiped her eyes. “Yes.”
“One last thing,” Pam said. “Have you opened up to Ethan about what happened prior to his arrival? Your, um… living situation… I mean.”
“Of course not. It’s only been two weeks.”
“Why haven’t you?”
“What’s the point?”
“You don’t think your husband deserves to know?”
“It would only cause hurt.”
“Your son might tell him.”
“Ben won’t. We already talked about it.”
“Last time you were here, you rated your depression on a scale of one to ten as a seven. How about today? Are you feeling better, worse, or the same?”
“The same.”
Pam opened a drawer and took out a small white bottle that rattled with pills.
“You’ve been taking your medication?”
“Yes,” Theresa lied.
Pam set the bottle on the desktop. “One a day, at bedtime, just like before. It’ll last you until our next appointment.”
Theresa sat up.
She felt like she always did after these things finished—emotionally ragged.
“Can I ask you something?” Theresa said.
“Sure.”
“I assume you talk to a lot of people. Hear everyone’s private fears. Will this place ever feel like home?”
“I don’t know,” Pam said as she stood. “That’s entirely up to you.”