“Thank you, God!” she cried and snatched them off the cactus. The graduate student’s stomach was bothering her. She hustled off the mountain path, defecated, and used the providential papers to wipe herself.
To continue the march to her thirty-year pension, Van Lampley took a job at the women’s prison in Curly, which was where the vast majority of Dooling’s surviving prisoners were shifted. Celia Frode ended up there, though not for long (paroled), and so did Claudia Stephenson.
They were, by and large, a rough bunch at Curly Correctional—lots of tightly wired girls, lots of tough women with felony priors—but Van was up to it. One day a white girl with faux gold teeth, cornrows, and a forehead tattoo (it said EMPTY in bleeding letters) asked Van how she got the limp. The inmate’s sneer was both piggy and jovial.
“I kicked a little too much ass,” Van said, a harmless lie. She had kicked exactly the right amount of ass. The officer rolled up her sleeve to show the tattoo on her mighty left bicep: YOUR PRIDE, etched on the gravestone with the wee arm. She turned the other way and rolled up the other sleeve. On her equally impressive right bicep another gravestone had been inked. ALL YOUR FUCKING PRIDE was etched on this one.
“Okay,” the tough girl said, losing the sneer. “You’re cool.”
“You better believe it,” Van said. “Now move along.”
Sometimes Van prayed with Claudia, now the ordained Reverend Stephenson. They prayed for forgiveness for their sins. They prayed for Ree’s soul. They prayed for Jeanette’s soul. They prayed for the babies and the mothers. They prayed for whatever needed praying on.
“What was she, Claudia?” Van asked once.
“It’s not what she was, Vanessa,” said Reverend Stephenson. “It’s what we are.”
“And what would that be?”
The reverend was stern—very unlike the old Claudia, who would not say boo to a goose. “Resolved to be better. Resolved to be stronger. Ready to do whatever we have to do.”
It would have killed her, the cervical cancer that had been brewing in Janice Coates, but the clock on the other side of the Tree had slowed its growth somehow. Also, her daughter had seen it on the other side of the Tree. Michaela took her mother to an oncologist two days after the women awoke, and the warden was receiving chemotherapy two days after that. Janice acquiesced to Michaela’s demand that she step down from her position immediately, allowing Michaela to make all the arrangements, to take care of her, to order her to the doctor, to bed, and to take her meds on a regular basis. Michaela also made sure her mother stopped smoking.
In Michaela’s humble opinion, cancer was horseshit. She had lost her father at a young age, and she was still working through some of the emotional horseshit that had come with that. But horseshit abounded. Horseshit was something you had to shovel pretty much non-stop if you were a woman, and if you were a woman in television, you had to shovel it double-time. Michaela could shovel it triple-time. She had not driven home from DC, rammed a bad biker’s vintage ride, stayed awake for days smoking Garth Flickinger’s meth, and survived a gruesome armed conflict in order to succumb to any variety of horseshit whatsoever, even if that horseshit was a disease that actually belonged to her mother.
Following her course of chemo, when the clean scan came back that told them Janice was in remission, Michaela said to her mother, “All right. What are you going to do now? You need to stay active.”
Janice said Mickey was absolutely right. Her first plan: to drive Michaela to DC. Her daughter needed to go back to work.
“Are you ever going to try and report on what happened?” Janice asked her daughter. “Personal experience type of thing?”
“I’ve thought about it, but…”
“But?”
There were problems, that was the but. First, most people would say that the adventures of the women on the far side of the Tree were horseshit. Second, they would say that no such supernatural creature as “Evie Black” had ever existed, and that Aurora had been caused by perfectly natural (if as yet undiscovered) means. Third, if certain authorities decided Michaela wasn’t spouting horseshit, questions would be raised that the authorities in Dooling—especially former Sheriff Lila Norcross—could not answer.
For a couple of days Janice stayed with her daughter in the capital. The cherry blossoms were long gone. It was hot, but they did a lot of walking anyway. On Pennsylvania Avenue they saw the president’s motorcade, a train of gleaming black limos and SUVs. It went straight through without stopping.
“Look.” Michaela pointed.
“Who gives a shit?” Janice said. “Just another swinging dick.”
In Akron, Ohio, at the apartment he lived in with his aunt Nancy, checks began to arrive made out to Robert Sorley. The amounts were never large—twenty-two dollars here, sixteen dollars there—but they added up. These checks were drawn from the account of a woman named Elaine Nutting. In the cards and letters that accompanied the checks, Elaine wrote to Bobby about his late mother, Jeanette, about the life of kindness and generosity and achievement that she had envisioned for him.
Though Bobby had not known her as well as he had wanted, and because of her crime, had never quite been able to trust her while she was alive, Bobby had loved his mother. The impression she seemed to have made on Elaine Nutting convinced him that she had been good.
Elaine’s daughter, Nana, included drawings with some of her mother’s letters. She was really talented. Bobby asked her to please draw him a picture of a mountain so he could look at it and think of the world beyond Akron, which wasn’t such a bad place but was, you know, Akron.
She did. It was a beauty—streams, a monastery in a crook of a valley, birds circling, clouds lit from above, a winding footpath leading to the unseen far side.
Because you said please, Nana wrote.
Of course I said please, he wrote back to her. Who doesn’t say please?
In her next letter, she wrote, I know a lot of boys who don’t say please. I don’t have room on this paper to write the names of all the boys I know who don’t say please.
In response, he wrote, I’m not one of those boys.
They became regular correspondents, and eventually planned to meet.
Which they did.
Clint never asked Lila if she’d taken a lover during her time on the other side of the Tree. It was as though there was a universe inside her husband, an arrangement of meticulously detailed and landscaped planets hanging down from wires. The planets were ideas and people. He explored them and studied them and came to know them. Except they didn’t move, didn’t rotate, didn’t change over time, the way actual bodies, astral and otherwise, did. Lila sort of understood that, knowing that once he’d lived a life where there had been nothing but movement and uncertainty, yet that didn’t mean she had to like it. Or accept it.
And how it felt to have killed Jeanette Sorley, accident though it had been? That was something he could never understand, and the few times he tried, she walked away fast, fists clenched, hating him. She did not know exactly what it was that she wanted, but it was not to be understood.
Upon waking that first afternoon, Lila drove her cruiser from Mrs. Ransom’s driveway directly to the still-smoldering prison. Tiny bits of dissolving cocoon were still clinging to her skin. She organized the removal of the attackers’ bodies and the sweeping up and disposal of police weapons and gear. The helpers she martialed in this task were, primarily, the inmates of Dooling Correctional. These women, convicted criminals who had surrendered their freedom—virtually all of whom were survivors of domestic abuse, or survivors of addiction, or survivors of poverty, or survivors of mental illness, or some combination of all four—were not unaccustomed to distasteful labor. They did what they had to. Evie had given them a choice and they had made it.