Slowly, we march out of the prison into the blinding sunlight of the parking lot, and I stand on the pavement with my head craned back until the sun warms me all the way through to my bones. Slowly, the girls step onto the yellow bus. Officer Prosser escorts me last.
“Don’t suppose there’s much point in chaining you up,” she says. “Not like you’ll do much damage with no hands and a pair of boots.”
“A pair of boots is the reason I’m locked up,” I say.
From the seat in front of me, Angel chuckles.
“Well, gimpy’s got a sass mouth!” Officer Prosser says. “Now sit your ass down.”
I settle into the plasticized leather seat and let her chain me to the floor. She tugs hard on my belt after she’s fastened the lock.
The girls are entirely quiet as we watch Missoula slide past the windows. The rocking motion of a moving vehicle still makes me a little queasy, and the muscles that cup my eyeballs are strained in minutes, but I can’t tear my eyes away. It’s all too fascinating, a ring of fallen pine needles beneath every tree and the new bottle-shaped flowers freeing themselves from the earth, the blinding way the sun covers everything in cellophane white.
The bus makes waves of dust along the dirt road bordering the wild orchard. We unload and they run a plastic-coated metal cord through each of our belt loops so we’ll have some freedom of movement. Angel is in front of me in line. I’m the last.
“All right, ladies,” Officer Prosser says, puffing herself up. “You’re here doing a good deed. Pay attention to how it feels because, for some of you, it’ll be the first time.”
We shuffle forward as a unit through the knee-high grass, a clinking snakelike thing so orange it might offend nature. The fruit hanging from the trees are bell-shaped, yellow-green, and speckled. Pears. They smell like newborn autumn. They hang low enough to touch a mouth to.
Angel and I walk far, the cord tying us to the other girls whizzing through the metal loops at our belts, until we’re deep enough into the trees to barely hear the voices of the other girls. The pears are still unripe, none yet fallen to the ground, so Mrs. New instructed us that the best way to glean them was to take a limb of a tree in our hands and shake. Angel approaches a branch and reefs on it. A shower of pears falls. She reaches down and tosses them in a wooden crate nearby.
I kneel on the grass and roll a pear toward me with a stump, up the length of my leg, and hold it to my stomach. I drop it in the crate. Angel’s picked twenty by the time I manage one.
I get tired of that pretty quickly so I approach the nearest pear hanging from a bough. I open my mouth and fit my teeth over the buxom curve of it, still slightly hard. It tastes sharp and sweet.
Angel smiles. “You gonna eat your way through all these?”
“If I have to.”
I feel the tension around my waist loosen as the guards let out more of the plastic-coated cord so the girls can climb into the trees to reach the higher branches. I walk a few minutes by myself, craning my neck so all I see is the tops of trees, steel-gray mountains, and the sky. I haven’t walked through the wild like this since I left the Community. I feel it might not be too late to relearn wilderness, the way shadows bloom like footprints under trees, the way it is never truly silent.
Do I want to? a small voice asks.
The last time I saw the sky like this, it was still swathed in smoke from the fire that devoured the Community. Now, the sky is jewel bright and radiating blue heat, and it’s almost enough to make me forget that fire, forget the final moments of the Prophet’s life, the room like an oven, smoke falling through the roof in ribbons. Sometimes all I can remember of that night is gray smoke. I try to follow the lines back to that moment, but they get crossed, blurred in all that choking fog.
I’ve walked so far, the only indication that I’m not all alone out here is the soft voices of the girls through the walls of trees and the silver cord around my waist. I bring my head back down, and my eyes fall to the tree line beyond the meadow. That’s where the real wilderness starts, the shadowed pines that absorb none of this sunlight.
A shape at the forest’s edge materializes. The silhouette of a person, ragged clothes hanging off bone-sharp limbs. His skin is dark brown, and his pants hang so loose, his suspenders are the only thing holding them up. I stare, and he stares back with big hollowed eyes.
“Jude,” I whisper. I glance around to make sure no one hears me. Angel is far behind, buried in the branches of a tree, only visible because her boots are propped up on a low branch. All I can think is I can’t let anyone see him. They might catch him and throw him away.