If, that was, she decided to go through with it.
The golf carts they’d taken on the expedition to that weird tree in the woods were all neatly parked in the lot behind what was left of the Municipal Building. One good thing you could say for women, she thought—one of many things—was that they usually put things away when they were done with them. Men were different. They left their possessions scattered hell to breakfast. How many times had she told Frank to put his dirty clothes in the hamper—wasn’t it enough that she washed them and ironed them, without having to pick them up, as well? And how many times did she still find them in the bathroom outside the shower, or littered across the bedroom floor? And could he be bothered to rinse a glass or wash a dish after a late night snack? No! It was as if dishes and glasses became invisible once their purpose had been served. (The fact that her husband kept his office immaculate and his animal cages spotless made such thoughtless behavior more irritating.)
Small things, you would say, and who could disagree? They were! But over the course of years, those things became a domestic version of an old Chinese torture she’d read about in a Time-Life book that she’d pulled out of a donation box at Goodwill. The Death of a Thousand Cuts, it was called. Frank’s bad temper had only been the worst and deepest of those cuts. Oh, sometimes there was a present, or a soft kiss on the back of the neck, or a dinner out (with candlelight!), but those things were just frosting on a stale and hard-to-chew cake. The Cake of Marriage! She was not prepared to say every man was the same, but the majority were, because the instincts came with the package. With the penis. A man’s home was his castle, so the saying went, and etched into the XY chromosome was a deep belief that every man was a king and every woman his serving maid.
The keys were still in the carts. Of course they were—there might be an occasional case of petty pilfering in Our Place, but there had been no real theft. That was one of the nice things about it. There were many nice things, but not everyone could be content with those things. Take all the whining and whingeing that went on at the Meetings, for instance. Nana had been at some of those meetings. She didn’t think Elaine knew, but Elaine did. A good mother monitors her child, and knows when she is being infected by bad companions with bad ideas.
Two days ago it had been Molly at their house, and the two girls had a wonderful time, first playing outside (hopscotch and jump-rope), then inside (re-decorating the large dollhouse Elaine had felt justified in liberating from the Dooling Mercantile), then outside again until the sun went down. They had eaten a huge supper, after which Molly had walked the two blocks back to her house in the gloaming. By herself. And why could she do that? Because in this world there were no predators. No pedophiles.
A happy day. And that was why Elaine was so surprised (and a bit fearful, why not admit it) when she had paused outside her daughter’s door on the way to bed and heard Nana crying.
Elaine chose a golf cart, turned the key, and toed the little round accelerator pedal. She rolled soundlessly out of the lot and down Main Street, past the dead streetlights and dark storefronts. Two miles out of town she reached a neat white building with two useless gas pumps out front. The sign on the roof proclaimed it the Dooling Country Living Store. The owner, Kabir Patel, was gone, of course, as were his three well-mannered (in public, at least) sons. His wife had been visiting her family in India when the Aurora struck, and was presumably cocooned in Mumbai or Lucknow or one of those other places.
Mr. Patel had sold a bit of everything—it was the only way to compete with the supermarket—but most of it was gone now. The liquor had disappeared first, of course; women liked to drink, and who taught them to enjoy it? Other women? Rarely.
Without pausing to look in the darkened store, Elaine drove her golf cart around to the back. Here was a long metal annex with a sign out front reading Country Living Store Auto Supply Shop Come Here First And SAVE! Mr. Patel had kept it neat, she would give him points for that. Elaine’s father had done small-engine repair to supplement his income as a plumber—in Clarksburg, this had been—and the two sheds out back where he worked had been dotted with cast-off parts, bald tires, and any number of derelict mowers and rototillers. An eyesore, Elaine’s mother had complained. It pays for your Fridays at the beauty salon, replied the king of the castle, and so the mess had remained.
Elaine needed to put her whole weight against one of the doors before it would move on its dirty track, but eventually she got it to slide four or five feet, and that was all she needed.
“What’s the matter, sweetie?” she had asked her crying daughter—before she’d known that damned tree existed, when she’d thought her child’s tears were the only problem she had, and that they would end as quickly as a spring shower. “Does your tummy hurt from supper?”
“No,” Nana said, “and you don’t need to call it my tummy, Mom. I’m not five.”
That exasperated tone was new, and set Elaine back on her heels a bit, but she continued to stroke Nana’s hair. “What is it, then?”
Nana’s lips had tightened, trembled, and then she had burst. “I miss Daddy! I miss Billy, he held my hand sometimes when we walked to school and that was nice, he was nice, but mostly I miss Daddy! I want this vacation to be over! I want to go back home!”
Instead of stopping, as spring showers did, her weeping had become a storm. When Elaine tried to stroke her cheek, Nana knocked her hand away and sat up in bed with her hair wild and staticky around her face. In that moment, Elaine saw Frank in her. She saw him so clearly it was scary.
“Don’t you remember how he shouted at us?” Elaine asked. “And the time he punched the wall! That was awful, wasn’t it?”
“He shouted at you!” Nana shouted. “At you, because you always wanted him to do something . . . or get something . . . or be something different . . . I don’t know, but he never shouted at me!”
“He pulled your shirt, though,” Elaine said. Her disquiet deepened into something like horror. Had she thought Nana had forgotten Frank? Relegated him to the junkheap along with her invisible friend, Mrs. Humpty-Dump? “It was your favorite, too.”
“Because he was afraid of the man with the car! The one who ran over the cat! He was taking care of me!”
“Remember when he yelled at your teacher, remember how embarrassed you were?”
“I don’t care! I want him!”
“Nana, that’s enough. You’ve made your p—”
“I want my Daddy!”
“You need to close your eyes and go to sleep and have sweet dr—”