The singing stopped.
“Where was it coming from?”
“I don’t know.”
Somewhere far away, that was about the only thing Kayleigh could tell for sure. Had it drifted all the way from Dooling? Where was Dooling? This was definitely not Dooling. Or was it? Hard to tell. Impossible, really.
A gentle wind circled through the darkness. The air was fresh and good and under her feet the ground felt not like cement or sticky tile, but like grass. She squatted down and touched: yes, it was grass, or weeds, about knee high. Birds chattered faintly somewhere. Kayleigh had awakened feeling strong and young and well rested.
Correctional had taken twelve years from her, the better part of her thirties, the first couple of years of her forties, and it had a claim on another ten. Maura was the best part of those lost years. It wasn’t something that could ever have worked outside the walls, of course, the deal they had, but in prison you made do. If Kayleigh had been suddenly shoved out the doors of Dooling Correctional she would have remembered Maura fondly and gratefully, and moved on. You didn’t carry a torch for a triple-murderer no matter how strangely charming you found them. The woman was nuts, Kayleigh had no illusions about that. She loved Kayleigh wholly, though, and Kayleigh loved to be loved. And you know, maybe she, Kayleigh, was a little nuts, too.
There had been no heedless love in the time before prison. No love of any kind, really, not since she was a little child.
On one job—not the one they clipped her for—Kayleigh and her boyfriend had knocked over a pill shop in back of an hourly motel. In the room there’d been a teenage kid in a rocking chair. The rocking chair had been nice, polished to a glow, totally out of place in the fleabag motel, a throne amid garbage. The kid who sat in it had a massive, volcanic hole in his cheek. It was a glossy, swirling mix of red and pitch black; a hot mess from which came the wafting smell of rotting flesh. How had it happened? Had it started with a scratch, a scrape, a tiny infection? Or had someone cut him with a dirty blade? Was it a disease? Kayleigh felt lucky not to have to know or care.
She put the kid at about sixteen. He scratched his pale belly and watched as she and her boyfriend kicked around, searching for the stash. What else was wrong with him that he just sat there calm as could be and watched them with no fear?
Kayleigh’s boyfriend found what he was hunting for under the mattress and stuffed it into his jacket. He turned to the kid. “Your face is putrid,” he said. “You know that?”
“I know,” the kid said.
“Good. Now get the fuck out of the chair, son.”
The kid didn’t give any trouble. He got up from the chair and dropped onto the sprung bed, lying there and scratching his stomach. They took the rocking chair along with the money and the drugs. They could do that because the boyfriend had a panel truck.
That was the kind of life she led in those days, one where she had stood by and helped the man she slept with steal the very chair a kid was sitting in. A ruined kid. And guess what? It was a life where the kid did nothing about it. He just lay down and pointed his ruined face at the ceiling and scratched his belly and did fuck-all else. Maybe because he was stoned. Maybe because he didn’t give a shit. Maybe both.
There was a floral scent on the breeze.
Kayleigh felt a pang for Maura, but at the same time, she was stirred by an intuition: that this was a better place, better than prison, better than the world outside prison. It felt boundless, and there was earth beneath her feet.
“Whoever you are, I got to tell you I’m scared,” said Magda. “And I’m worried about Anton.”
“Don’t be scared,” said Kayleigh. “I’m sure Anton’s fine.” Not knowing who that was, nor caring. She felt for Magda’s hand and found it. “Let’s walk toward the birdsong.” They edged forward in the blackness, finding themselves moving down a gentle grade, among trees.
And was that a glimmer of a light there? Was that a crack of sun in the sky?
It was blazing dawn when they came to the overgrown remains of a trailer. From there, they were able to follow the ghost of a dirt lane to the time-shattered pavement of Ball’s Hill Road.
CHAPTER 15
1
Leaving Old Essie’s den behind, the fox cut a zigzag path through the surrounding woods, pausing to rest in the damp below an overgrown shed. In his sleep he dreamed that his mother brought him a rat, but it was rotten and poison, and he realized that his mother was sick. Her eyes were red and her mouth hung crooked and her tongue lolled to the ground. That was when he remembered that she was gone, his mother was many seasons gone. He had seen her lie down in tall grass, and the next day, she still lay in the same place, but was no longer his mother.
“There’s poison in the walls,” said the dead rat in his dead mother’s mouth. “She says the earth is made of our bodies. I believe her, and oh, the pain doesn’t end. Even death hurts.”
A cloud of moths descended on the fox’s dead mother and the dead rat.
“Don’t stop, child,” said the mother fox. “You have work.”
The fox jerked up out of his sleep and felt a sharp pain as he struck his shoulder against the edge of something jutting down, a nail or glass or a shard of board. It was early evening.
From close by came a thunderous crash: metal and wood, a gasp of steam, the tearing sound of fire catching. The fox darted from under the overgrown shed, breaking hard for the road. Beyond the road loomed the bigger woods and, he hoped, safer ground.
At the side of the road, a car was buckled against a tree. A woman on fire was dragging a man from the front seat of the car. The man was screaming. The sound the burning woman made was a dog sound. The fox understood what it meant: I will kill you, I will kill you, I will kill you. Tendrils of burning web fluttered away from her body.
Here was a moment of decision. High among the fox’s catalog of personal statutes was Thou Shalt Not Cross the Road in Daylight. There were more cars in the day, and cars could not be intimidated or warned off, let alone defeated. As they zoomed over the pavement, they made a sound, too, and if you listened (a fox should always listen), that sound was words, and the words were I want to kill you, I want to kill you, I want to kill you. The hot and leaking remains of animals that had failed to heed these words had provided the fox with many excellent snacks.
On the other hand, a fox that wanted to survive needed to maintain a fluid approach to danger. He needed to balance the threat of a car that wanted to kill you with a woman cloaked in fire declaring that she was going to kill you.