Leaving Old Essie’s den behind, the fox cut a zigzag path through the surrounding woods, pausing to rest in the damp below an overgrown shed. In his sleep he dreamed that his mother brought him a rat, but it was rotten and poison, and he realized that his mother was sick. Her eyes were red and her mouth hung crooked and her tongue lolled to the ground. That was when he remembered that she was gone, his mother was many seasons gone. He had seen her lie down in tall grass, and the next day, she still lay in the same place, but was no longer his mother.
“There’s poison in the walls,” said the dead rat in his dead mother’s mouth. “She says the earth is made of our bodies. I believe her, and oh, the pain doesn’t end. Even death hurts.”
A cloud of moths descended on the fox’s dead mother and the dead rat.
“Don’t stop, child,” said the mother fox. “You have work.”
The fox jerked up out of his sleep and felt a sharp pain as he struck his shoulder against the edge of something jutting down, a nail or glass or a shard of board. It was early evening.
From close by came a thunderous crash: metal and wood, a gasp of steam, the tearing sound of fire catching. The fox darted from under the overgrown shed, breaking hard for the road. Beyond the road loomed the bigger woods and, he hoped, safer ground.
At the side of the road, a car was buckled against a tree. A woman on fire was dragging a man from the front seat of the car. The man was screaming. The sound the burning woman made was a dog sound. The fox understood what it meant: I will kill you, I will kill you, I will kill you. Tendrils of burning web fluttered away from her body.
Here was a moment of decision. High among the fox’s catalog of personal statutes was Thou Shalt Not Cross the Road in Daylight. There were more cars in the day, and cars could not be intimidated or warned off, let alone defeated. As they zoomed over the pavement, they made a sound, too, and if you listened (a fox should always listen), that sound was words, and the words were I want to kill you, I want to kill you, I want to kill you. The hot and leaking remains of animals that had failed to heed these words had provided the fox with many excellent snacks.
On the other hand, a fox that wanted to survive needed to maintain a fluid approach to danger. He needed to balance the threat of a car that wanted to kill you with a woman cloaked in fire declaring that she was going to kill you.
The fox bolted. As he passed her, the heat of the burning woman was in his fur and in the cut on his back. The burning woman had started to pound the man’s head against the pavement and the roar of her anger grew louder, but it faded as the fox scrambled down the embankment on the opposite side of the road.
In the big woods he slowed his pace. The cut in his lower back made his rear right leg hurt every time he pushed off. It was night. Last year’s leaves crackled under the fox’s pads. He stopped to drink from a stream. Oil swirled in the water, but he was thirsty and had to take what he could get. A hawk perched on a stump by the stream. It picked at the belly of a squirrel.
“Let me have some?” the fox called. “I could be a friend to you.”
“A fox has no friends,” said the hawk.
It was true, but the fox would never admit it. “What liar told you that?”
“You’re bleeding, you know,” the hawk said.
The fox didn’t care for the bird’s chipper tone.
The fox thought it wise to change the subject. “What’s going on? Something has changed. What’s happened to the world?”
“There’s a tree further on. A new tree. A Mother Tree. It appeared at dawn. Very beautiful. Very tall. I tried to fly to the top, but although I could see the crown, it was beyond my wings.” A bright red knot of intestine snapped free of the squirrel’s body and the hawk gulped it down.
The hawk tilted its head. A second later a smell twitched the fox’s nostrils: smoke. It had been a dry season. If the burning woman had crossed the road, a few steps into the brush would have been enough to make it all go up.
The fox needed to get moving again. He panted. He was afraid and he was hurt—but he still had his wits.
“Your eyes will make a fine meal for some lucky animal,” the hawk said, and took flight, the limp squirrel locked in its talons.
As was hardly uncommon, the First Thursday Book Club had begun to drift away from that month’s text, which happened to be Atonement, by Ian McEwan. The novel’s story followed two lovers, sundered from one another almost before their relationship had begun, by the false accusation of a preternaturally imaginative young girl named Briony.
Dorothy Harper, at seventy-nine the group’s elder stateswoman, said she was unable to forgive Briony for her crime. “That little baggage ruined their lives. Who cares if she was sorry?”
“They say the brain doesn’t fully develop until you’re much older,” said Gail Collins. “Briony was only twelve or thirteen when she told the lie. You can’t blame her.” Gail held her glass of white wine in both hands, cupped around the bowl. She was situated at the nook table by the kitchen bar.
Blanche McIntyre, Warden Coates’s faithful assistant (usually faithful, at least), had met Gail in a secretarial class thirty years earlier. Margaret O’Donnell, the fourth member of the First Thursday Book Club, was Gail’s sister, and the only woman Blanche knew who had a stock portfolio.
“Who says that?” Dorothy asked. “About the brain?”
“Scientists,” Gail said.
“Pish-tush!” Dorothy waved a hand, as if to make a bad smell go away. (Dorothy was the only woman Blanche knew who still said things like pish-tush.)
“It’s true.” Blanche had heard Dr. Norcross at the prison say almost exactly the same thing, that the human brain wasn’t fully developed until a person reached their twenties. Was it really such a surprise, though? If you had ever known a teenager—or, for that matter, been one—wasn’t it axiomatic? Teenagers didn’t know what the hell they were doing, especially male ones. And a girl of twelve? Forget it.
Dorothy sat in the armchair by the front window. It was her condo, a neat second-floor unit on Malloy Street with plush slate-colored carpeting and fresh beige walls. The view was of the woods that backed up the building. Of the world’s current unrest, the only visible sign was a fire—like a match flame at this distance—off in the west, toward Ball’s Hill and Route 17. “It was just so cruel. I don’t care how small her brain was.”
Blanche and Margaret were seated on the couch. On the coffee table stood the open bottle of Chablis and the still-corked bottle of Pinot. There was also the plate of cookies that Dorothy had baked, and the three bottles of pills that Margaret had brought.
“I loved it,” said Margaret. “I loved the whole book. I thought all the details about nursing during the Blitz were amazing. And everything about the big battle and France and walking to the shore, wow! A real trek! An epic trek, you could say! And romance, too! It was pretty spicy stuff.” She shook her head and laughed.
Blanche twisted to look at her, annoyed despite the fact that Margaret was on her side about liking Atonement. Margaret had worked for the railroads until they gave her a nifty bundle of cash to take early retirement—some people were just so darn lucky. She was a terrible giggler, was Margaret O’Donnell, especially for someone who was past seventy, and foolish about ceramic animals, dozens of which were crowded on her windowsills. For her last book pick she’d chosen the Hemingway novel about the idiot who wouldn’t let go of the fish, a book that had aggravated Blanche, because it was, let’s face it, just a goddam fish! Margaret had thought that one was romantic, too. How could a woman like that have turned her early retirement bundle into a stock portfolio? It was a mystery.