Coates walked over and, without any ceremony, wrapped her arms around Maura Dunbarton’s short legs. She looked over at Lila. “Come on, then, don’t make me wait. Smells like she loaded her pants. Suicide is so glamorous.”
They buried both the killer and her hapless victim outside the sagging ring of fencing that surrounded the prison. It was summer again by then, bright and hot, with chiggers popping around the grass tops. Coates spoke a few words about Kayleigh’s contribution to the community and Maura’s puzzling act of homicide. A chorus of the children sang “Amazing Grace.” Their little girl voices made Lila weep.
She had salvaged a number of photographs of Jared and Clint from their home, and she sometimes attended the Meetings, but as time passed, her son and husband began to seem less real. At night, in her tent—Lila preferred to camp out as long as the weather was clement—she wound her crank flashlight, and scanned their faces in the beam. Who would Jared become? There was still that softness at the edges of his face, even in the most recent of the pictures. It hurt her not to know.
She looked at her husband’s image, his wry smile and graying hair, and missed him, though not as much as she missed Jere. Her suspicions of Clint on that horrible last day and night embarrassed her; her lies and the pointless fears made her ashamed. But Lila also found herself regarding her husband differently now that she saw him through the lens of memory. She thought about how carefully he’d bricked up his past, the way he’d used his authority as a doctor to bolster the concealment and ward her off. Had Clint thought that only he could handle that kind of pain? That it was too much for her little mind and puny spirit to absorb? Or was it a kind of egotism masquerading as strength? She knew men were taught (primarily by other men, of course) that they were to keep their pain to themselves, but she also knew marriage was supposed to undo some of that teaching. That hadn’t been the case with Clint.
And there was the pool. It still made her mad. And how he’d quit his job without a moment’s notice all those years ago. And a million tiny decisions in between, taken by him, and for her to live with. It made her feel like a Stepford Wife, even with her husband in some other world.
Owls hooted in the dark, and dogs, run feral after who knew how many canine generations, howled. Lila zipped the flap of her tent. The moon shone blue through the yellow fabric. Remembering all that domestic soap opera depressed her, her parts and his parts, back and forth, he slams one door, she slams the other. The histrionic crap she had always looked down on in other people’s marriages. Condescension, thy name was Lila, she thought, and had to laugh.
5
The hedges that once framed the prison had flourished into dense mounds. Lila entered through the gouge in the foliage that Coates and the other women who had awakened there had hacked out. Entry to the prison itself was through a hole in the south wall. Something—Lila was guessing the industrial gas stove in the kitchen—had exploded, blowing out the concrete as easily as a child huffing out a birthday candle. Going in, she half-expected to emerge in yet another place—a white beach, a cobbled thoroughfare, a rocky mountaintop, Oz—but when she arrived, it was only a wing of former cells. The walls were half-crumbled, some of the barred doors blown right off their hinges. She thought that the detonation must have been a doozy. Weeds grew from the floor and mold crawled across the ceiling.
She walked through the ruined wing and emerged into the central hall of the prison, what Clint called Broadway. Things looked better here. Lila followed the red line painted down the middle of the corridor. The various gates and barriers were unlocked; the wire-reinforced windows that gave onto the prison’s facilities—cafeteria, library, the Booth—were fogged over. Where Broadway reached the front doors there was another section that showed signs of an explosion: busted cinderblocks, dusty shards of glass, the steel door separating the entry area from the prison proper crumpled inward. Lila skirted the junk.
Farther down Broadway she passed the open door to the staff lounge. Inside, mushrooms sprouted from the wall-to-wall carpeting. The air reeked of enthusiastic plant-life.
She eventually came to Clint’s office. The corner window was blown out and a mass of overgrown shrubbery poured in, flowering with white blooms. A rat was rummaging around in the stuffing of a torn couch cushion. It gawked at Lila for a moment and darted for the safety of a pile of crumbled drywall.
The Hockney print behind her husband’s desk hung askew, cocked at eleven and five. She straightened it. The picture showed a plain, sandy-colored building with rows of identically curtained windows. At ground level, the building had two doors. One door was blue, the other red: examples of Hockney’s famous colors, bright like the feelings aroused by good memories, even if the memories themselves were thin—and the interpretative possibilities had appealed to Lila. She had given it to Clint all those years ago, thinking that he might point to it and say to his patients: “See? Nothing is closed to you. There are doors to a healthier, happier life.”
The irony was as glaring as the metaphor. Clint was in another world. Jared was in another world. For all she knew, one or both of them might be dead. The Hockney print belonged to the rats and mold and weeds of this world. It was a broken world, emptied out and forgotten, but it was the one they had. It was, God save us, Our Place. Lila left the office and retraced her steps through the dead world of the prison to the hole in the foliage. She wanted out.
6
Throughout those months, more women continued to appear from what James Brown had once called a man’s, man’s, man’s world. They reported that in Dooling, when they’d fallen asleep, the Aurora crisis was still fresh; there, only two or three days had passed. The violence and confusion and desperation they talked about seemed unreal to the earlier arrivals in this new place. More—it seemed almost unimportant. The women of this world had their own problems and concerns. One of them was the weather. Summer waned. After the fall, the winter would follow.
With the aid of manuals from the library, and overseen by the unlikely personage of Magda Dubcek, the widow of a contractor (not to mention the mother of Lila’s pool boy), they were able to finish some of the work Kayleigh had begun before being murdered by her crazy ex-girlfriend. Magda’s late husband had taught her quite a bit about electrical work. “My husband, he was telling me what he was doing every day: ‘And look, here is the live wire, Magda, and look here is the ground wire, and so on.’ I listen. He never knew it, he thought he was just talking to some stupid wall, but I listen.” At this, Magda paused to make a sly face that reminded Lila, heartbreakingly, of Anton. “Well, for the first five hundred times I listen, anyway.”