“No, no,” said Ben. “Keep going. I’m fascinated.”
“First of all, chickens look for ways to die,” said Lucy. “You know how people always get upset about chickens being kept in those little cages on factory farms? Well, those are the lucky chickens. You take those chickens out of their cages and put them anywhere near the natural world and they will die horrible, gruesome, violent deaths.”
“Give me an example.”
“Okay, so one morning I go out to the chicken coop, and there’s a dead chicken inside. It’s missing its head. Its head has just disappeared.”
“What happened to it?”
“I had to go online to find out,” said Lucy. “Apparently, a raccoon ripped it off and ate it. Raccoons do that. If a chicken gets too close to a spot with chicken wire, a raccoon will reach his hand in and rip off its head.”
“That’s horrible.”
“I know. So what you do is, you make the coop more secure, you figure out what happened, and things go well for a while and then one night, a chicken vanishes.”
“Just—disappears,” said Ben.
“Exactly. And then the next night, another one goes. And the next night, another. And every day you try to figure out what is happening, you look for holes and you take pictures of the carcasses and post them online for chicken people to make sense of. If you can find them. The carcasses, I mean. It’s easy to find the online chicken people.”
“If you can find them?”
“Sometimes they’re dragged off into the woods. Sometimes they’re eaten in the coop or in the run.”
“This whole thing sounds horrible,” Ben said, laughing. “You should be in jail.”
“I know!”
“Really. I should report you to the authorities.”
“And sometimes, it remains a mystery,” Lucy went on. “You plug some little hole someplace and the carnage stops, but you never really know what caused it.”
“My sister would love you,” Ben said. “You’re living her dream life.”
“You have a sister?”
“I have a sister and two brothers. What about you?”
“Just a sister. She’s a lawyer. She lives in San Francisco.”
“Are you youngest or oldest?”
“Youngest. You?”
“Oldest.”
“Look at us,” said Lucy. “First-date talk.”
“Yeah,” said Ben. “So, tell me, Miss Lucy. Where did you grow up?”
*
For the first stretch of their life together, Owen and Lucy visited Owen’s family once a year, at Thanksgiving. They flew to Colorado and slept on a pull-out couch in a room that doubled as the TV room and they carried their toiletries in and out of the bathroom because there was no counter space or drawer space or even so much as a bit of an unclaimed shelf on which they could place them. The house was overrun by Owen’s extended family, his two brothers and their wives and kids, who’d arrived early and claimed all the spare bedrooms, a pattern that started when Owen and Lucy were not yet married and then perpetuated itself year after year with no apparent option for renegotiation. Still, they came every year, and they tried not to talk about politics, or guns, or religion, and if you’d asked either of them, they would have agreed that it would continue like that more or less forever.
But things changed when Wyatt was two. The visit had been four days of misery, with Wyatt completely off the chain, overstimulated by his seven loud, hyperactive, proudly unvaccinated cousins (the entire Colorado clan was opposed to vaccinations, in some weird strain of Republicanism they linked with their love of the Second Amendment and desire for freedom from the federal government). Lucy had pleaded with Owen to go home early, or at least check them into a hotel, but Owen had refused, worried that either option would damage his mother’s feelings beyond repair. Wyatt became more and more unglued—he would not sleep, he did not eat, and Owen’s mother insisted on taking pictures of him without switching off the flash, even though every time it went off, it sent him into another round of hysterics. On the flight back, Wyatt had gotten so completely out of control that the plane had to land. Owen and Lucy rented a car and drove the rest of the way home.
A week later, Owen got a long, handwritten letter from his mother stating in no uncertain terms that there was nothing wrong with Wyatt, he was just in his terrible twos, and the real problem was that Lucy refused to discipline him. And then she suggested that he and Lucy might have made a mistake when they opted to have Wyatt vaccinated, because, well, there had been links. And she had warned Lucy about them, remember?
Lucy found the letter a few months later, tucked into the nest of junk inside Owen’s nightstand, and she exploded. (Why didn’t I throw away the letter? Owen thought a million times. I should have burned the letter.) But what was done was done. And their yearly trip to Colorado to see his family was no longer in the cards.
“They can come here,” Lucy suggested coolly whenever the topic came up. “We have a spare room. Your father is retired, and fortunately for them, your parents don’t have an autistic child. They’re welcome to visit us whenever they want.” But as she aged, Owen’s mother was beset by neuroses and maladies that served her most basic desires—she wanted to sleep in her own bed, be matriarch in her own house, cook her own holiday meals. Earlier that year, when Owen pressed her to come visit, she’d claimed her doctor told her it was no longer safe for her to fly.
It was weird, the thought of facing life without any real connection to extended family. And Beekman felt like roots, in a weird way. It was probably why both he and Lucy were not just drawn to Beekman, but committed to staying there. Beekman felt like a place your kids could come back to. Or, in the case of Wyatt, a place your kid would be okay if he never actually left.
What was going to happen to Wyatt? It was a thought that struck Owen a lot, most often late at night. What happens to these kids? Once, when Wyatt was in preschool, all the kids and their parents went on a field trip to a farm that was a boarding school for autistic teenagers and, it turned out, a permanent residence for autistic adults. They trained dogs there, the bomb-sniffing and seeing-eye kind, and they ran an organic farm, which required a lot of labor. (“When you don’t use pesticides, somebody has to pick the slugs off the lettuce,” Owen overheard one parent say.) The day of the field trip was almost impossibly beautiful, blue skies with puffy white clouds, the grass springtime green, baby sheep scampering in the fields, and Owen tried to be optimistic. There were two-story dormitories scattered across the property, connected with winding paths painted different colors. This wouldn’t be so bad, Owen tried to make himself believe. A life filled with well-behaved dogs and frolicking sheep and puffy clouds and organic tomatoes? Harvard might be out of the question—okay, Harvard was out of the question—but was this kind of life really so bad?
On the ride home, Wyatt fell asleep in his car seat.
“That was kind of nice,” said Owen.