Tiffany nodded. “How about this, then: can you shoot backwards?” She turned away from the basket, bent her knees low, and flipped the ball over her head. It went up, caromed off the corner of the square, caught the rim—and fell off, bounce, bounce, bounce, so close.
An ocher gush belched from the tap. A pipe clanked loudly against another pipe. The brownish flow sputtered, stopped, and then, hallelujah, clean water began to pour into the sink.
“Well,” said Magda Dubcek to the small assembly around the work-sink set against the wall of the water treatment plant. “Dere it is.”
“Incredible,” said Janice Coates.
“Nah. Pressure, gravity, not so complex. We be careful, turn on one neighborhood each at a time. Slow but steady win the race.”
Lila, thinking of the ancient note from Magda’s son Anton, undoubtedly a dope and a cocksman, but pretty damn sharp about the ways of water in his own right, abruptly hugged the old lady.
“Oh,” said Magda, “all right. Thanks.”
The water echoed in the long room of the Dooling County Water District plant, hushing them all. In silence, the women took turns passing their hands though the fresh stream.
One of the things everyone missed was the ability to just jump in a car and drive somewhere, instead of walking and getting blisters. The cars were still there, some in pretty good shape from being parked in garages, and at least some of the batteries they found in storage still held juice. The real problem was gasoline. Every drop had oxidized during the in-between period.
“We’ll have to refine some,” the retired engineering professor explained at a committee meeting. Not more than a hundred and fifty miles distant, in Kentucky, there were storage wells and refineries that might be re-started with work and luck. They immediately began to plan another journey; they assigned tasks and selected volunteers. Lila scanned the women in the room for signs of misgivings. There were none. Among the faces, she took special note of Celia Frode, the only survivor of the exploration party. Celia nodded along with the rest of them. “Put me on that list,” Celia said. “I’ll go. Feel a need to put on my rambling shoes.”
It would be risky, but they would be more careful this time. And they would not flinch.
When they got to the second floor of the demo house, Tiffany announced that she wasn’t climbing the ladder to the attic. “I’ll wait here.”
“If you’re not coming up, why’d you come at all?” Lila asked. “You’re not that pregnant.”
“I was hoping you’d give me some of your Tic Tacs, ringer. And I’m plenty pregnant enough, believe me.” Lila had won H-O-R-S-E and the mints.
“Here.” She tossed the box to Tiffany, and climbed up the ladder.
The Pine Hills show house had, ironically, proved to be better constructed than almost every other structure on Tremaine, including Lila’s own. Although dim—small windows smudged by the passage of seasons—the attic was dry. Lila paced the space, her footfalls drawing puffs of dust from the floor. Mary had said that this was the one where she and Lila and Mrs. Ransom were, back there, wherever back there was. She wanted to feel herself, to feel her son.
She didn’t feel anything.
At one end of the attic, a moth was batting against one of the dirty windows. Lila walked over to release it. The window was stuck. Lila heard creaking as, behind her, Tiffany climbed the ladder. She moved Lila aside, took out a pocket knife, worked the point around the edges, and the window went up. The moth escaped and flew away.
Below, there was snow on the overgrown lawns, on the busted-up street, on her dead cruiser in Mrs. Ransom’s driveway. Tiffany’s horses were poking their noses around, nickering about whatever it was that horses nickered about, switching their tails. Lila could see past her own house, past the pool that she had never wanted and that Anton had tended, and past the elm tree that he had left her the note about. An orange animal trotted from the shadowy edge of the pine woods that backed the neighborhood. It was a fox. Even at this distance the luster of its winter coat was evident. How had it got to be winter so soon?
Tiffany stood in the middle of the attic. It was dry, but also cold, especially with the window open. She held out the box of Tic Tacs for Lila to take back. “I wanted to eat them all, but it would’ve been wrong. I’ve given up my life of crime.”
Lila smiled and put them back in her own pocket. “I declare you rehabilitated.”
The women stood about a foot apart, looking at each other, breathing steam. Tiffany pulled off her hat and dropped it on the floor.
“If you think that’s a joke, it’s not. I don’t wanna take anything from you, Lila. I don’t wanna take anything from anybody.”
“What do you want?” asked Lila.
“My very own life. Baby and a place and stuff. People that love me.”
Lila closed her eyes. She’d had all those things. She couldn’t feel Jared, couldn’t feel Clint, but she could remember them, could remember her very own life. It hurt, those memories. They made shapes in the snow, like the angels they’d made as children, but those shapes became fuzzier every day. God, she was lonesome.
“That’s not so much,” Lila said, and reopened her eyes.
“It seems like a lot to me.” Tiffany reached out and drew Lila’s face to hers.
The fox trotted away from the Pine Hills development, across Tremaine Street, and into the thick stands of winter wheat that had grown up on the far side. He was hunting for the smell of hibernating ground squirrels. The fox loved ground squirrels—Crunchy! Juicy!—and on this side of the Tree, unbothered for so long by human habitation, they had grown careless.
After a half hour’s search he discovered a little family of them in a dug-out chamber. They never awoke, even as he was crushing them between his teeth. “So tasty!” he said to himself.
The fox went on, entering the deep woods, making for the Tree. He paused briefly to explore an abandoned house. He pissed on a pile of books scattered on the floor and nosed fruitlessly around in a closet full of rotting linens. In the kitchen of the house there was food in the refrigerator that smelled deliciously spoiled, but his attempts to bump the door ajar accomplished nothing.
“Let me in there,” the fox demanded of the fridge, just in case it was only pretending to be a dead thing.
The fridge loomed, unresponsive.
A copperhead slid out from under the woodstove on the far side of the kitchen. “Why are you glowing?” it asked the fox. Other animals had commented on this phenomenon and were wary of it. The fox saw it himself when he looked into still water and saw his reflection. A gold light clung to him. It was Her mark.
“I’ve had some good fortune,” the fox said.
The copperhead wriggled its tongue at him. “Come here. Let me bite you.”
The fox ran from the cabin. Various birds heckled him as he loped beneath the canopy of gnarled and tangled bare branches, but their petty jibes meant nothing to the fox, whose belly was full and whose coat was thick as a bear’s.
When he emerged into the clearing, the Tree was there, the centerpiece of a leafy, steaming oasis in the fields of snow. His paws crossed over from the cold ground to the rich, warm summer loam that was the Tree’s forever bed. The Tree’s branches were layered and blended in countless greens and beside the passage in the bole, the white tiger, flicking its great tail, watched him approach with sleepy eyes.
“Don’t mind me,” said the fox, “just passing through.” He darted by, into the black hole, and out the opposite side.
CHAPTER 7