And here is where the strangest moment of my entire life happened: my mother, that good Christian woman, snapped.
“No!” she shouted, so loudly that I held the phone away from my ear. “You listen to me, young lady. This is your problem! This has always been your problem! You think kindness is some silly frivolous side virtue, when it is in fact the whole damn thing!”
I’d never heard her say a curse word in my life. “Mother,” I sputtered again, “I just—”
She roared in return, her anger vibrating through the phone like some energetic hex: “WHYISITSOHARDFORYOUTOBEKIND?”
53
This land is not how I remember it.Or rather—this land is not how I imagined it. How many times did I walk through these snowy woods, in the years and years I lived on this farm?
None, is the true answer. Not one time.
It goes by so fast.That’s what you’re supposed to say when someone, or something, forces you to consider all the horrible time-management mistakes you made as a parent, all the birthdays you forgot, all the beautiful moments that you attended, yes, but weren’t really there for.
What can I say? It goes by so fast. You blink and they’re grown, out of the house, gone.
It’s true. I blinked and they were gone.
Clementine,the child who made me a mother,and Samuel and Stetson,my darling young men.And Jessa,our resident firecracker!And Junebug—well, I hadn’t spent enough time with her to find her personality shorthand. Each additional child fell a little further away from me. When I try to conjure their faces now, it’s only Clementine’s I can see perfectly. If I think hard enough, I can manage the rough outlines of the boys—but Jessa and Junebug? They’re not memories so much as they are ideas. Ancient hieroglyphs painted along the far walls of my mind.
As I move through the leaves, tracing my fingers along the parchment-paper feel of birch branches and the calcified wrinkles ofmaple trunks, I think of all the charcoal sketches of my life. All the things I meant to do and didn’t.
I meant to learn Junebug’s personality. I meant to walk through these woods. Meant to go fishing in our river with the boys; to pocket salmon by the handful and then lie out on the sun-warmed rocks and listen to the rushing water. I meant to turn off my phone. I meant to revive the old apple orchard I’d been so excited about when we first bought the property. I meant to actually learn about farming, and to actually learn how to grow things, not just a child or an Instagram account but a carrot, a calf, a sapling. I meant to have a media empire. Magazines and a television show and a big office in some faraway city. I meant to have sprawling gardens, acres of them, all around the ranch. Meant to know the name of every wildflower native to Idaho. Meant to learn about herbal medicines, tonics, and tinctures. I meant to meet more people in person—really I did, I was nearlyready—but then I blinked and I was gone.
Which is to say: this, right now, is the first time I have ever walked through these woods. Nothing is recognizable to me, not the small mole-like trio of boulders I stumble past, or the sloping, wide curve of this trail. I feel no flickering sense of déjà vu in this forest, no shutter-click of confusion, the way I do when I look at the children, the horse, the barn.
This forest has never been mine.
I walk for what feels like a very long time. The snow soaks through my boots, and before long my toes are stinging with cold. Eventually I see it. Just barely visible in the distance through the trees: a small log cabin. Strange: the trail I’m on seems to be taking me away from it. Maybe it will loop me around on the other side, but suddenly I feel pressed for time, and so I cut off the trail and half walk, half trot straight toward it. My feet are completely numb, and I keep stumbling and tripping on roots, and then soon I am standing in front of the cabin in the middle of a large, man-made clearing, and that is when I see it, just barely visible behind the cabin: metallic, unnatural blue.
I hear myself whisper—no, whimper—aloud, like I am a child, like I am just now being born again: “Truck.”
Smoke is rising from the chimney. Above the front door, a word is etched into the doorframe:MANOSPHERE.
So this is where the men go.
54
Shannon’s hair had been highlighted.The nose ring was gone. She was wearing a prairie dress from one of the clothing lines that frequently sent me massive clothing hauls. She looked less like herself and more like a girl from Brooklyn who had raided a roommate’s closet an hour before she had to attend a steak dinner with her boyfriend’s Midwestern parents.
The anchorwoman sitting across from her was the same one from the week before. Erin something. She was wearing less eye shadow, and her general demeanor had shifted from the breezy composure of an evening news summary to something more somber and investigative.A woman in search of the truth.She leaned forward, pressed a hand to Shannon’s knee, and offered her a look of blazing solidarity. “Shannon, I want to start this conversation by asking you a personal question: How old are you?”
Shannon shifted in her chair. “I’m twenty-one years old.”
“And how old were you when you first began work at Yesteryear Ranch?”
“Nineteen.”
Erin gave the camera a long, sideways look. Everyone shifted uncomfortably. Caleb, Doug, Amelia, and I were all squished tensely on one stretch of sectional. The lawyers were sitting in chairs behind us. The nannies were with the children, having received firm instructions:Stay out of the living room.I’d been waiting all day forthis moment, and still I felt unprepared for it and a little bit woozy. My phone hadn’t stopped buzzing in days. My mother was a liar. My sister was a useless bitch. And the Angry Women, oh—
“That’s pretty young,” Erin said.
“Yeah. It feels like a really long time ago.” Shannon pushed her bottom lip out into a delicate pout. Remarkable. The girl was rich, the lawyers had learned. Her father was in finance. Her mother was a civil rights lawyer. Shannon, it turned out, had traveled to more countries already than most people do in their whole lives.I’ve never seen the Pacific Ocean!Oh,please,she’d seen practically all the others—and now some publicist had dressed her up and slapped her around to make her look as vulnerable as a five-year-old foster child. She might as well have been wearing pigtails.
“And how old is your employer, Caleb?”
“I’mher employer,” I said, right as Shannon said regretfully, “He’s thirty-five.”
