“You know what I mean, don’t you? From being around him.”
“I suppose I do. Clint has—another side. A harder side. Angrier. I didn’t come to see it clearly until recently.”
“It pisses me off. But you know what’s worse? It’s left me feeling kind of . . . disheartened.”
Janice was using a twig to poke bits of caked mud off the face of the statue. “I can see how that would dishearten a person.”
The golf carts started to move away, followed by their small, tarp-draped trailers of supplies. The procession moved out of sight and then reappeared for a couple of minutes where the road ascended to higher ground before disappearing for good.
Lila and Janice switched to other topics: the ongoing repairs to the houses on Smith; the two beautiful horses that had been corralled and taught—or perhaps re-taught—how to take riders; and the wonder Magda Dubcek and those two former prisoners claimed to be on the verge of bringing to fruition. If they could get more juice, more solar panels, clean running water seemed to be a foreseeable possibility. Indoor plumbing, the American dream.
It was dusk before they were talked out, and never once did the subject of Clint, of Jared, of Archie, of Candy Meshaum’s husband, of Jesus Christ, or of any other man, again arise to trouble their discourse.
3
They didn’t talk about Evie, but Lila had not forgotten her. She had not forgotten about the suggestive timing of Eve Black’s appearance in Dooling, or her strange, knowing talk, or the webbed tracks in the woods near Truman Mayweather’s trailer. She had not forgotten about where those tracks had brought her, either, to the Amazing Tree, driving up into the sky on its countless roots and intertwined trunks. As for the animals that had appeared from around the Tree—the white tiger, the snake, the peacock, and the fox—Lila remembered them, too.
Her mental picture of the spiraling roots of the Tree, like the cords for a giant’s sneakers, the way they wound around each other, recurred often. It was so perfect, so majestic, the plan of its being so right.
Had Evie come from the Tree? Or had the Tree come from Evie? And the women of Our Place—were they dreamers, or were they the dream?
4
Icy rain pelted Our Place for forty-eight hours, snapping tree branches, pouring chilly slop through the holes in roofs, filling the streets and walks with cloudy puddles. Lila, stretched in her tent, occasionally put aside the book she was reading to kick at the walls and break off the frozen coating that had formed on the vinyl. The sound was like breaking glass.
Before, she’d switched from paper books to an e-reader, little suspecting that the world would break down and make such things obsolete. There were still books in her house, though, and a few of them weren’t moldy. When she finished the one she was reading, she ventured from her tent in the front yard to the wreckage of her home. It was too depressing—too redolent of her son and husband—for Lila to imagine living in it, but she hadn’t been able to bring herself to move away.
The slicks of rain sliding down the interior walls glistened in the beam of her crank flashlight. The rain sounded like an ocean being stirred. From a shelf at the back of the living room, Lila picked out a damp mystery novel, and started to return the way she had come. The beam caught an odd, parchment-colored leaf, lying on the rotted seat of a stool by the kitchen counter. Lila picked it up. It was a note from Anton: the information for his “tree guy,” to deal with the Dutch Elm in the backyard.
She studied the note for a long time, stunned by it, by the sudden closeness of that other life—her real life? her previous life?—which appeared like a child darting out between parked cars and into traffic.
5
The exploration party had been gone a week when Celia Frode returned on foot, splattered in mud from head to toe. She was alone.
6
Celia said that beyond Dooling Correctional, in the direction of the little neighboring town of Maylock, the roads had become impassable; every tree they cleared from the highway only got them a few yards before they came to the next one. It was easier to leave the golf carts and hike.
There was no one in Maylock when they got there, and no sign of recent life. The buildings and houses were like the ones in Dooling—overgrown, in states of greater and lesser disrepair, a few burned by fires—and the road above Dorr’s Hollow Stream, which was now a swollen river with sunken cars for shoals, had collapsed. Probably they should have turned around then, Celia conceded. They’d scavenged useful supplies from the grocery store and other businesses in Maylock. But they got to talking about the movie theater in the small town of Eagle that was another ten miles off, and how great it would be for the kids if they came back with a film projector. Magda had assured them that their big generator would be up to such tasks.
“They still had that new Star Wars movie playing there,” Celia said, and added, wryly, “You know, Sheriff, the one where the girl’s the hero.”
Lila didn’t correct the “Sheriff.” It had turned out to be remarkably difficult to quit being a cop. “Go on, Celia.”
The exploring party crossed the Dorr’s Hollow Stream at a bridge that was still intact, and picked up a mountain road called Lion Head Way that seemed to offer a shortcut to Eagle. The map they’d been using—borrowed from the remains of the Dooling Public Library—showed an old, unnamed coal company road curling off near the top of the mountain. The company road could take them to the interstate, and from there the going would be easy. But the map turned out to be outdated. Lion Head Way now dead-ended at a plateau, where stood that dreary place of male incarceration called Lion Head Prison. The company road they had been hoping to find had been plowed under during the construction of the prison.
Because it was late in the day, rather than attempt to backtrack the narrow, broken decline off the mountain in the dark, they had decided to camp at the prison, and start fresh in the morning.
Lila was all too familiar with Lion Head Prison; it was the maximum security facility where she had anticipated the Griner brothers would spend the next twenty-five or so years.