“There you go,” Lila said.
“Oh,” Janice replied, getting the drift. “Oh shit.”
“Oh shit covers it, all right. At first I thought—hoped—that maybe it was some sort of misinterpretation on the part of the newer arrivals. They’d been sleep-deprived, of course, and distressed, and maybe they saw something on television that they thought was cocoons being burned, but was actually something else.” Lila inhaled deeply of the late fall air. It was so crisp and clean it made you feel taller. No exhaust smells. No coal trucks. “That instinct, to doubt what women say, it’s always there. To find some reason not to take their word. Men do it… but we do, too. I do it.”
“You’re too hard on yourself.”
“And I saw it coming. I talked about it with Terry Coombs not more than three or four hours before I fell asleep in the old world. Women reacted when their cocoons were torn. They were dangerous. They fought. They killed. It doesn’t surprise me that a lot of men might see the situation as an opportunity, or a precaution, or the pretext they’d always wanted to light a few people on fire.”
Janice offered a slanted smile. “And I get accused of taking a less than sunny view of the human race.”
“Someone burned Essie, Janice. Back in our world. Who knows who. And someone burned Candy Meshaum. Was her hubby upset because his punching bag fell asleep on him? He’d definitely be the first person I’d question, if I was there.”
Lila sat down on the fallen statue. “And the dizziness? I’m pretty sure that’s also because of what’s happening back there. Someone moving us. Moving us around like furniture. Right before Essie was burned, she was in a low mood. I’m guessing that maybe someone moved her a bit before lighting her up and it was the vertigo that had her down.”
“Pretty sure you’ve got your ass on Dooling’s first mayor,” said Janice.
“He can take it. Someone washed his underwear for him. This is our new honorary bench.” Lila realized she was furious. What had Essie or Candy Meshaum ever done, except finally find a few months of happiness out of the entirety of their rotten lives? Happiness that had come at the price of nothing more than a few dolls and a converted storage space with no windows.
And men had burned them. She was sure of it. That was how their story ended. When you died there, you died here, too. Men had ripped them right out of the world—right out of two worlds. Men. There seemed to be no escape from them.
Janice must have read her thoughts… or, more likely, her face. “My husband Archie was a good guy. Supported everything I ever did.”
“Yeah, but he died young. You might not have felt that way if he’d stuck around.” It was an awful thing to say, but Lila didn’t regret it. For some reason, an old Amish saying occurred to her: KISSIN’ DON’T LAST, COOKIN’ DO. You could say that about a lot of things when it came to the wedded state. Honesty. Respect. Simple kindness, even.
Coates gave no sign of offense. “Clint was that bad a husband?”
“He was better than Candy Meshaum’s.”
“Low bar,” Janice said. “Never mind. I’ll just sit here and treasure the gilded memory of my husband, who had the decency to pop off before he became a shit.”
Lila let her head loll back. “Maybe I deserved that.” It was another sunny day, but there were gray clouds to the north, miles of them.
“Well? Was he that bad a husband?”
“No. Clint was a good husband. And a good father. He pulled his weight. He loved me. I never doubted that. But there was a lot he never told me about himself. Things I shouldn’t have had to find out in ways that made me feel bad about myself. Clint talked the talk, about openness and support, talked until his face turned blue, but when you got below the surface, he was your basic Marlboro Man. It’s worse, I think, than being lied to. A lie indicates a certain degree of respect. I’m pretty sure he was carrying a bag of stuff, real heavy stuff, that he thought I was just too delicate to help him with. I’d rather be lied to than condescended to.”
“What do you mean by a bag of stuff… ?”
“He grew up rough. I think he fought his way out, and I mean that literally. I’ve seen the way he rubs his knuckles when he’s preoccupied or upset. But he doesn’t talk about it. I’ve asked, and he does the Marlboro Man thing.” Lila glanced at Coates, and read some variety of unease in her expression.
“You know what I mean, don’t you? From being around him.”
“I suppose I do. Clint has—another side. A harder side. Angrier. I didn’t come to see it clearly until recently.”
“It pisses me off. But you know what’s worse? It’s left me feeling kind of… disheartened.”
Janice was using a twig to poke bits of caked mud off the face of the statue. “I can see how that would dishearten a person.”
The golf carts started to move away, followed by their small, tarp-draped trailers of supplies. The procession moved out of sight and then reappeared for a couple of minutes where the road ascended to higher ground before disappearing for good.
Lila and Janice switched to other topics: the ongoing repairs to the houses on Smith; the two beautiful horses that had been corralled and taught—or perhaps re-taught—how to take riders; and the wonder Magda Dubcek and those two former prisoners claimed to be on the verge of bringing to fruition. If they could get more juice, more solar panels, clean running water seemed to be a foreseeable possibility. Indoor plumbing, the American dream.
It was dusk before they were talked out, and never once did the subject of Clint, of Jared, of Archie, of Candy Meshaum’s husband, of Jesus Christ, or of any other man, again arise to trouble their discourse.
They didn’t talk about Evie, but Lila had not forgotten her. She had not forgotten about the suggestive timing of Eve Black’s appearance in Dooling, or her strange, knowing talk, or the webbed tracks in the woods near Truman Mayweather’s trailer. She had not forgotten about where those tracks had brought her, either, to the Amazing Tree, driving up into the sky on its countless roots and intertwined trunks. As for the animals that had appeared from around the Tree—the white tiger, the snake, the peacock, and the fox—Lila remembered them, too.
Her mental picture of the spiraling roots of the Tree, like the cords for a giant’s sneakers, the way they wound around each other, recurred often. It was so perfect, so majestic, the plan of its being so right.
Had Evie come from the Tree? Or had the Tree come from Evie? And the women of Our Place—were they dreamers, or were they the dream?
Icy rain pelted Our Place for forty-eight hours, snapping tree branches, pouring chilly slop through the holes in roofs, filling the streets and walks with cloudy puddles. Lila, stretched in her tent, occasionally put aside the book she was reading to kick at the walls and break off the frozen coating that had formed on the vinyl. The sound was like breaking glass.
Before, she’d switched from paper books to an e-reader, little suspecting that the world would break down and make such things obsolete. There were still books in her house, though, and a few of them weren’t moldy. When she finished the one she was reading, she ventured from her tent in the front yard to the wreckage of her home. It was too depressing—too redolent of her son and husband—for Lila to imagine living in it, but she hadn’t been able to bring herself to move away.
The slicks of rain sliding down the interior walls glistened in the beam of her crank flashlight. The rain sounded like an ocean being stirred. From a shelf at the back of the living room, Lila picked out a damp mystery novel, and started to return the way she had come. The beam caught an odd, parchment-colored leaf, lying on the rotted seat of a stool by the kitchen counter. Lila picked it up. It was a note from Anton: the information for his “tree guy,” to deal with the Dutch Elm in the backyard.