“Trailer came unhitched. From Pet-Whatever. The chain store? Went over on its side, blocked the whole road. Cat litter and dog food all over. We ended up having to bulldoze it out of the way.”
“That sounds like a shit-show.” He bent down and put a kiss on her cheek. “Hey. You want to start jogging together?” The idea had just occurred to him and he was immediately cheered. You couldn’t stop your body from breaking down and thickening, but you could fight back.
Lila opened her right eye, pale green in the dimness of the room with the curtains pulled. “Not this morning.”
“Of course not,” Clint said. He hung over her, thinking she was going to kiss him back, but she just told him to have a good day, and make sure Jared took out the trash. The eye rolled closed. A flash of green . . . and gone.
4
The smell in the shed was almost too much to bear.
Evie’s bare skin pebbled up and she had to fight not to retch. The stench was a mingling of scorched chemicals, old leaf smoke, and food that had spoiled.
One of the moths was in her hair, nestled and pulsing reassurance against her scalp. She breathed as shallowly as she could and scanned around.
The prefab shed was set up for cooking drugs. In the center of the space was a gas stove attached by yellowish tubes to a pair of white canisters. On a counter against the wall there were trays, jugs of water, an open package of Ziploc bags, test tubes, pieces of cork, countless dead matches, a one-hitter with a charred bowl, and a utility sink connected to a hose that ran away and out under the netting that Evie had pulled back to enter. Empty bottles and dented cans on the floor. A wobbly-looking lawn chair with a Dale Earnhardt Jr. logo stamped on the back. Balled up in the corner, a gray checked shirt.
Evie shook the stiffness and at least some of the filth from the shirt, then drew it on. The tails hung down over her bottom and thighs. Until recently, this garment had belonged to someone disgusting. A California-shaped stain running down the chest area reported that the disgusting person liked mayonnaise.
She squatted down by the tanks and yanked the yellowing tubes loose. Then she turned the knobs on the propane tanks a quarter inch each.
Outside the shed again, netting drawn closed behind her, Evie paused to take deep breaths of the fresher air.
Three hundred feet or so down the wooded embankment stood a trailer fronted by a gravel apron with a truck and two cars parked on it. Three gutted rabbits, one of which was still dripping, hung from a clothesline alongside a few faded pairs of panties and a jean jacket. Puffs of woodsmoke rose from the trailer’s chimney.
Back the way she came, through the thin forest and across the field, the Tree was no longer visible. She wasn’t alone, though: moths furred the roof of the shed, fluttering and shifting.
Evie started down the embankment. Deadwood branches stabbed her feet, and a rock cut her heel. She didn’t break stride. She was a fast healer. By the clothesline, she paused to listen. She heard a man laughing, a television playing, and ten thousand worms in the little patch of ground around her, sweetening the soil.
The rabbit that was still bleeding rolled its foggy eyes at her. She asked it what the deal was.
“Three men, one woman,” the rabbit said. A single fly flew from its tattered black lips, buzzed around, and zoomed into the cavity of a limp ear. Evie heard the fly pinging around in there. She didn’t blame the fly—it was doing what a fly was made to do—but she mourned the rabbit, who did not deserve such a dirty fate. While Evie loved all animals, she was especially fond of the smaller ones, those creepers of meadow and leapers of deadfall, the fragile-winged and the scuttling.
She cupped her hand behind the dying rabbit’s head, and gently brought its crusted black mouth to hers. “Thank you,” Evie whispered, and let it be quiet.
5
One benefit of living in this particular corner of Appalachia was that you could afford a decent-sized home on two government salaries. The Norcross home was a three-bedroom contemporary in a development of similar houses. The houses were handsome, spacious without being grotesque, had lawns adequate for playing catch, and views that, in the green seasons, were lush, hilly, and leafy. What was a little depressing about the development was that even at reduced prices almost half of its rather attractive houses were empty. The demonstrator home at the top of the hill was the one exception; that one was kept clean and shiny and furnished. Lila said it was just a matter of time before a meth-head broke into it and tried to set up shop. Clint had told her not to worry, he knew the sheriff. In fact, they had a semi-regular thing.
(“She’s into old guys?” Lila had replied, batting her eyes and pressing herself to his hip.)
The upstairs of the Norcross house contained the master bedroom, Jared’s room, and a third bedroom, which the two adults used as a home office. On the first floor the kitchen was wide and open, separated from the family room by a counter bar. At the right side of the family room, behind closed French doors, was their little-used dining room.
Clint drank coffee and read the New York Times on his iPad at the kitchen bar. An earthquake in North Korea had caused an untold number of casualties. The North Korean government insisted that the damage was minor due to “superior architecture,” but there was cell phone footage of dusty bodies and rubble. An oil rig was burning in the Gulf of Aden, probably as a result of sabotage, but no one was claiming responsibility. Every country in the region had done the diplomatic equivalent of a bunch of boys who knock out a window playing baseball and run home without looking back. In the New Mexico desert the FBI was on day forty-four of its standoff with a militia led by Kinsman Brightleaf (nee Scott David Winstead Jr.). This happy band refused to pay its taxes, accept the legality of the Constitution, or surrender its stockpile of automatic weapons. When people learned that Clint was a psychiatrist, they often entreated him to diagnose the mental diseases of politicians, celebrities, and other notables. He usually demurred, but in this instance he felt comfortable making a long-distance diagnosis: Kinsman Brightleaf was suffering from some kind of dissociative disorder.