And there was the pool. It still made her mad. And how he’d quit his job without a moment’s notice all those years ago. And a million tiny decisions in between, taken by him, and for her to live with. It made her feel like a Stepford Wife, even with her husband in some other world.
Owls hooted in the dark, and dogs, run feral after who knew how many canine generations, howled. Lila zipped the flap of her tent. The moon shone blue through the yellow fabric. Remembering all that domestic soap opera depressed her, her parts and his parts, back and forth, he slams one door, she slams the other. The histrionic crap she had always looked down on in other people’s marriages. Condescension, thy name was Lila, she thought, and had to laugh.
The hedges that once framed the prison had flourished into dense mounds. Lila entered through the gouge in the foliage that Coates and the other women who had awakened there had hacked out. Entry to the prison itself was through a hole in the south wall. Something—Lila was guessing the industrial gas stove in the kitchen—had exploded, blowing out the concrete as easily as a child huffing out a birthday candle. Going in, she half-expected to emerge in yet another place—a white beach, a cobbled thoroughfare, a rocky mountaintop, Oz—but when she arrived, it was only a wing of former cells. The walls were half-crumbled, some of the barred doors blown right off their hinges. She thought that the detonation must have been a doozy. Weeds grew from the floor and mold crawled across the ceiling.
She walked through the ruined wing and emerged into the central hall of the prison, what Clint called Broadway. Things looked better here. Lila followed the red line painted down the middle of the corridor. The various gates and barriers were unlocked; the wire-reinforced windows that gave onto the prison’s facilities—cafeteria, library, the Booth—were fogged over. Where Broadway reached the front doors there was another section that showed signs of an explosion: busted cinderblocks, dusty shards of glass, the steel door separating the entry area from the prison proper crumpled inward. Lila skirted the junk.
Farther down Broadway she passed the open door to the staff lounge. Inside, mushrooms sprouted from the wall-to-wall carpeting. The air reeked of enthusiastic plant-life.
She eventually came to Clint’s office. The corner window was blown out and a mass of overgrown shrubbery poured in, flowering with white blooms. A rat was rummaging around in the stuffing of a torn couch cushion. It gawked at Lila for a moment and darted for the safety of a pile of crumbled drywall.
The Hockney print behind her husband’s desk hung askew, cocked at eleven and five. She straightened it. The picture showed a plain, sandy-colored building with rows of identically curtained windows. At ground level, the building had two doors. One door was blue, the other red: examples of Hockney’s famous colors, bright like the feelings aroused by good memories, even if the memories themselves were thin—and the interpretative possibilities had appealed to Lila. She had given it to Clint all those years ago, thinking that he might point to it and say to his patients: “See? Nothing is closed to you. There are doors to a healthier, happier life.”
The irony was as glaring as the metaphor. Clint was in another world. Jared was in another world. For all she knew, one or both of them might be dead. The Hockney print belonged to the rats and mold and weeds of this world. It was a broken world, emptied out and forgotten, but it was the one they had. It was, God save us, Our Place. Lila left the office and retraced her steps through the dead world of the prison to the hole in the foliage. She wanted out.
Throughout those months, more women continued to appear from what James Brown had once called a man’s, man’s, man’s world. They reported that in Dooling, when they’d fallen asleep, the Aurora crisis was still fresh; there, only two or three days had passed. The violence and confusion and desperation they talked about seemed unreal to the earlier arrivals in this new place. More—it seemed almost unimportant. The women of this world had their own problems and concerns. One of them was the weather. Summer waned. After the fall, the winter would follow.
With the aid of manuals from the library, and overseen by the unlikely personage of Magda Dubcek, the widow of a contractor (not to mention the mother of Lila’s pool boy), they were able to finish some of the work Kayleigh had begun before being murdered by her crazy ex-girlfriend. Magda’s late husband had taught her quite a bit about electrical work. “My husband, he was telling me what he was doing every day: ‘And look, here is the live wire, Magda, and look here is the ground wire, and so on.’ I listen. He never knew it, he thought he was just talking to some stupid wall, but I listen.” At this, Magda paused to make a sly face that reminded Lila, heartbreakingly, of Anton. “Well, for the first five hundred times I listen, anyway.”
With power scavenged from a handful of solar panels that had survived the years of neglect, they were able to create a limited electrical grid for at least a few of the high-ground houses.
Regular cars were useless; it was impossible to determine how long this version of their world had spun unattended, but the state of the parked cars was a clue that it had been enough time for water and moisture to have its way with engines. A car stored in a still-standing garage might have been salvageable, except there wasn’t a drop of gasoline anywhere that hadn’t destabilized or evaporated. What the women did find was a small fleet of well-preserved solar-powered golf carts in the equipment shed at the country club. Once they were recharged, they started right up. Women drove them up and down streets that had been cleared of trees and foliage.
Like the Shopwell, the Olympia Diner had stood up to the passage of time remarkably well, and Rita Coombs, once the wife of Terry, reopened it on a barter basis, cooking with an old portable woodstove that a gang of women had helped haul up from the Coombses’ basement.
“I always wanted to try my hand at running a restaurant,” she explained to Lila, “but Terry never wanted me to work. He said it would make him worry. Terry could never understand how damn boring it was, to be a piece of china in a hutch.”
She said this in a light way, but kept her gaze averted in an expression of what Lila read as shame—a shame that came from being happy to have something of her own. Lila hoped Rita would get over it, and thought she would—eventually. There were a lot of them that felt changed, but in a way that might also contain that tincture of shame, as if they were playing hooky. Women like Magda and Rita, who suddenly found themselves in demand and flourishing in the light of a new world. As those unmarked weeks peeled away, they discussed not just what they missed, but also some of what they did not miss.
The leaves changed as they did in the old world, but to Lila their colors seemed more vibrant and longer-lasting.
She was in Mrs. Ransom’s garden one day in what felt like late October, picking pumpkins for the schoolgirls to carve. Old Essie, seated on a bench in the shade, watched her. Next to the bench was a rusty shopping cart full of things Essie had picked up, as if trying to restock her new life from memories of the old one: a radio, a cell phone, a heap of clothes, a dog collar, a calendar from 2007, a bottle of something that had no label but might have been maple syrup once upon a time, and a trio of dolls. She liked to follow Lila when she saw Lila in her big straw hat rolling the wheelbarrow piled high with gardening implements.
The old lady was silent at first, and shied away if anyone came near her, but as the weeks passed, she began to relax, at least around Lila. Sometimes she would even talk, although Lila guessed she’d never been a great conversationalist, even in her prime.