In the basement of the high school, where some variety of mold had made a feast of the filing cabinets full of decades-old school board transcripts, Lila unearthed a mimeograph machine that had probably not been used since the mid-sixties. It was packed neatly away in a plastic crate. Some of the erstwhile prison inmates turned out to be remarkably crafty. They helped Molly Ransom make fresh ink from swamp redcurrants, and the girl founded a single-sheet newspaper called Dooling Doings. The first headline was SCHOOL REOPENS! and she quoted Lila Norcross as saying, “It’s nice to see the kids getting back into their routine.” Molly asked Lila what her title was, Dooling Chief of Police or plain Sheriff. Lila said to just to call her “a local.”
And there were the Meetings. These took place once a week initially, then twice, and lasted an hour or two. Although they turned out to be extremely important to the health and well-being of the women living in Our Place, they came about almost by accident. The first attendees were the ladies who had called themselves the First Thursday Book Club in the old world. In this new one, they got together in the Shopwell supermarket, which had held up remarkably well. And they had enough to talk about without a book to get them started. Blanche, Dorothy, Margaret, and Margaret’s sister Gail sat on folding chairs at the front of the store, chatting about all the things they missed. These included fresh coffee and orange juice, air conditioning, television, garbage pickup, the Internet, and being able to just power up a phone and call a friend. Mostly, though—they all agreed on this—they missed men. Younger women began to drift in, and were welcomed. They talked about the gaps in their lives, places of absence that had once been filled by their sons, nephews, fathers, grandfathers . . . and their husbands.
“Let me tell you girls something,” Rita Coombs said at a Meeting toward the end of that first summer—by then there were almost four dozen ladies in attendance. “It may be too frank for some of you, but I don’t care. I miss a good old Friday night fuck. Terry was too quick on the trigger at the start of our relationship, but once I got him trained, he was fine. I had nights when I could pop off two little ones and one big one before he fired his gun. And afterward? Slept like a baby!”
“Don’t your fingers work?” someone asked, to general laughter.
“Yes, they do!” Rita retorted. She was also laughing, her cheeks as red as apples. “But darlin, they are not the same!”
This earned her a hearty round of applause, although a few women—Fritz Meshaum’s mousy wife, Candy, for one—abstained.
The two big questions came up, of course, in a hundred different ways. First, how had they come to be here, in Our Place? And why?
Was it magic? Was it some scientific experiment gone wrong? Was it the will of God?
Was their continued existence a reward or a punishment?
Why them?
Kitty McDavid was a frequent speaker when the discussion turned in this direction; Kitty’s memory of her Aurora’s eve nightmare—of the dark figure that she’d somehow recognized as a queen, and the cobwebs that had flowed from the queen’s hair—remained vivid, haunting her still. “I don’t know what to do, if I should pray for forgiveness or what,” she said.
“Oh, fuck it,” Janice Coates had advised her. “You can do what you want since the pope’s not here to make a ruling, but I’m just going to keep doing my best. What else is there to do, honestly, that we know for sure can make a difference?” This had been another crowdpleaser.
The question, however—What the fuck had happened?—was renewed again and again. Without lasting satisfaction.
At one Meeting (it was at least three months after what Janice Coates liked to call the Great Displacement), a new attendee crept in, and settled on a fifty-pound bag of fertilizer at the back of the room. She kept her head down during the lively discussion of life as it was now lived, and news of a wonderful discovery at the local UPS shipping office: nine boxes of Lunapads, which were reusable sanitary napkins.
“No more cutting up tee-shirts to stuff in my underwear at that time of the month!” Nell Seeger exulted. “Hallelujah!”
Toward the end of the Meeting, talk turned—as it always did—to those things they missed. These discussions almost always occasioned tears for the boys and men, but most of the women said they felt at least temporarily unburdened. Lighter.
“Are we done, ladies?” Blanche asked on this particular day. “Does anyone have a burning desire to share before we get back to work?”
A small hand went up, the fingers dusted with many different colors of chalk.
“Yes, dear,” Blanche said. “You’re new, aren’t you? And very short! Would you care to stand?”
“Welcome,” the women chorused, turning to see.
Nana Geary got to her feet. She brushed her hands down the front of her shirt, which was now very worn and raggedy at the sleeves . . . but still her favorite.
“My mom doesn’t know I’m here,” she said, “so I hope no one will tell her.”
“Honey,” said Dorothy Harper, “this is like Vegas. What goes on in Women’s Hour stays in Women’s Hour.”
This brought a murmur of laughter, but the little girl in the faded pink tee-shirt did not even smile. “I just want to say I miss my daddy. I went into Pearson’s Barber Shop and found some of his aftershave—Drakkar Noir, it’s called—and I smelled it, and it made me cry.”
The front of the supermarket was dead silent except for a few sniffles. It would turn out later that Nana hadn’t been the only one to visit the aftershave shelves at Pearson’s.
“I guess that’s all,” Nana said. “Just . . . I miss him, and I wish I could see him again.”
They applauded her.
Nana sat down and put her hands over her face.
4
Our Place was no utopia. There were tears, more than a few arguments, and during the first summer, a murder-suicide that shocked them all, mostly because it was utterly senseless. Maura Dunbarton, another refugee from the Dooling Correctional of the previous world, strangled Kayleigh Rawlings, then took her own life. It was Coates who fetched Lila to see.
Maura was hanging from a noose knotted to the rusty crossbar of a backyard swing set. Kayleigh had been discovered in the room the lovers had shared, dead in her sleeping bag, her face gray and the sclera of her open eyes filigreed with hemorrhages. She had been strangled, then stabbed at least a dozen times. Maura had left a note, penciled on a scrap of envelope.
This world is different, but I am the same. You will be better off without me. I have killed Kayleigh for no reason. She did not aggravate me or start anything. I still loved her, like in prison. I know she was useful to you. I could not help myself. It came on to me to kill her so I did. I was sorry I did it afterwards.—Maura
“What do you think?” asked Lila.
Janice said, “I think it’s a mystery, like everything else here. I think it’s a goddam shame that when it came on to the crazy bitch to kill someone, she picked the only one in Our Place who understood how to wire a circuit and make it hot. Now I’ll hold her legs while you climb up and cut her down.”