“It was an accident,” Janice said.
Lila bent down, scooped a handful of dirt, and tossed it on the shrouded figure in the hole. “The cops always say that after they shoot some poor black man or woman or child.”
“She had a gun.”
“She didn’t mean to use it. She came to save the Tree.”
“I know,” said Janice. She patted Lila’s shoulder. “But you didn’t. Remember that.”
A thick branch of the Tree moaned and cracked, smashing to the ground with an explosion of leaves.
“I’d give anything to take it back,” Lila said. She wasn’t crying. For now, tears were beyond her. “I’d give my soul.”
“I think it’s time to go,” said Michaela. “While we still can.” She took her mother’s hand and drew her into the Tree.
For a handful of minutes, Lila was the last woman in Our Place. She did not ponder this wonder, however. She had decided to be practical, starting right now. Her focus was on the dirt, on the shovel, and on filling the grave. Only when the work was done did she enter the dark of the Tree and cross over. She went without looking back. Doing that, she felt, would break her fragile heart.
PART THREE
IN THE MORNING
The maid is not dead, but sleepeth.
To most people in the weeks after the women awoke, the world seemed a bit like some dismal thrift store boardgame: there were pieces missing, not necessarily the important pieces, but definitely some you’d like to have had. You sensed, at the very least, certain cards that might have helped you to victory were absent.
Grief was everywhere, like a disfigurement. But what did you do when you lost a wife, or a daughter, or your husband? Unless you were like Terry Coombs—and some were—you lived with the loss and went on playing the game.
Pudge Marone, bartender and owner of the Squeak, had lost a piece of himself and learned to live with it. His right thumb now ended below the knuckle. It took him awhile to lose the habit of reaching for beer taps with that hand, but he made do. Then, he received an offer for the building from a guy who wanted to open a TGI Fridays franchise. Pudge told himself the Squeaky Wheel would never have recovered from Aurora anyway, and the payday was not bad.
Certain people—Don Peters, for instance—were not missed much at all. They were so completely forgotten it was like they never existed. The wreck of the Peters property was sold at auction.
Johnny Lee Kronsky’s few possessions were bagged up with the trash, but his grim apartment remains unoccupied to this day.
Van had left the door open when she left Fritz Meshaum’s house that last day of Aurora, and after he had been dead a day or two, the turkey vultures came in and helped themselves to the free buffet. Smaller birds came inside to harvest Fritz’s wiry red beard for nesting materials. Eventually, an enterprising bear dragged the carcass outside. In time, insects polished his skeleton clean, and the sun bleached his overalls white. Nature made use of him and, as was her way, managed to make something beautifuclass="underline" a bone sculpture.
When Magda Dubcek learned what had happened to Anton—the blood on her bedroom carpet told most of the story—she bitterly regretted her vote to come back. “What a mistake I have made,” she said to herself too many times to count, over too many rum and cokes to count. To Magda, her Anton wasn’t a piece, or two pieces, or three pieces; to her, he was the whole game. Blanche McIntyre tried to get Magda involved in volunteering—there were so many children who had lost a parent and needed help—and she invited her to join the book club, but Magda wasn’t interested. “There is no happy ending for me here,” she said. On long, sleepless nights, she drank and watched Boardwalk Empire. When she finished that one, she moved on to The Sopranos. She filled the empty hours with stories of mean men doing mean things.
For Blanche, there was a happy ending.
She awoke in Dorothy’s apartment, on the floor where she had fallen asleep a few days before, and peeled herself out of the remains of her decaying cocoon. Her friends were there, too, likewise coming around and tearing themselves free. But one thing was different: Andy Jones. The baby was not in Blanche’s arms, as he had been when she entered the Tree. He was asleep in a crude crib made of woven twigs on the floor nearby.
“Holy shit,” Dorothy said. “The kid! Yippee!”
Blanche took it as a sign. Tiffany Jones Daycare was built on the site of a home that had burned down during Aurora. The project was financed from Blanche’s retirement fund, and from that of her new boyfriend (which, in Willy Burke’s case, had been accruing without interest in the lining of his yellowed mattress since 1973), and from many community donations. In the wake of Aurora, it seemed that many more people were charitably inclined than had previously been the case. The Norcross family was particularly generous, in spite of their difficulties. On the sign outside, below Tiffany’s name, was a picture of a crib made of woven twigs.
Blanche and her staff accepted any child between the ages of one month and four years, regardless of the parents’ (or parent’s) ability to pay. After Aurora, it was small community operations like Blanche’s, in large part funded and staffed by men, that began the movement that led to the establishment of a universal childcare program. Many men seemed to understand that a rebalancing was necessary.
They had, after all, been warned.
Blanche thought once or twice of the novel they had met to talk about on that last night before everything changed: the story of a girl who told a lie that changed many lives. Blanche often considered the penance that weighed so heavily on that girl’s life. She, Blanche, did not feel that she owed any such penance. She was a decent person, had been a decent person all along, a hard worker and a good friend. She had always been good to the inmates of the prison. The daycare was not about atonement. It was about decency. It was natural, obvious, and essential. If the boardgame was missing pieces, it was sometimes—often, even—possible to make new ones.
Blanche had met Willy when he showed up at the door of the daycare, then still undergoing renovations, with a wad of fifty-dollar bills.
“What’s this now?” she asked.
“My share,” he said.
Except it wasn’t. Mere money wasn’t enough. If he wanted to share, he’d have to do his share.
“Kids crap so much,” Willy observed to Blanche one evening after they had been courting for awhile.
She was standing by her Prius, waiting for him to finish dragging two straining, translucent bags of used diapers to the bed of his truck. They would be washed at Tiny Tot Laundry in Maylock. Blanche had no intention of filling a landfill with used Pampers. Willy had lost weight and bought new suspenders. Blanche had thought he was cute before, but now, with his beard trimmed (and those pesky eyebrows), he was downright handsome.
“If you die on me, Willy,” said Blanche, “we’re going to have fun with the obituary. ‘Willy Burke died doing what he loved. Transporting poopy diapers across a parking lot.’ ” She blew him a kiss.
Jared Norcross volunteered at Tiffany Jones Daycare the following summer, and part-time during his senior year. He liked helping out. The kids were sort of demented—they made dirt castles and licked walls and rolled in puddles, and that was just when they were happy—but he was endlessly fascinated, like so many before him, at the easy way the boys and the girls played together. So what changed later on? Why did they suddenly split into largely separate playgroups almost as soon as they began organized school? Was it chemical? Genetic? Jared didn’t accept that. People were more complex; people had root systems, and their root systems had root systems. He had an inkling that in college he might like to study child behavior and eventually become a psychiatrist, like his father.