“You ruined that for me,” he said. “Now I’ll never be alone. Not now that you’ve—and with the whole world—” He dropped into a crouch, his hands over his ears, his face contorted. “My God,” he said desperately. “I feel like I’m suffocating.”
“Let me fix it,” I said, over his panicked breaths.
When he looked up at me, his expression was that of a child. My husband had always been such a child. “How?”
“Let me talk to your father.”
“He’s going to kill you, Nattie. I’m not joking. He wants you dead.”
“He doesn’t want me dead,” I said softly. “He just wants me fixed.”
An hour later, I was walking slowly down the hallway, hand tracing the walls, my feet equal parts lighter and heavier than I was used to. It wasn’t clear to me if I was marching toward my own salvation or toward my own imminent death.Don’t look back,I reminded myself.Don’t look back, don’t look back.
I imagined Caleb and my children turning to salt. The ranch set on fire. My whole world burning, the sky filled with ash.
But what about the women in the Bible who look forward? What happens to them?
A question so much easier for me to answer at thirty-three than it had been for me at seventeen.
57
I walk for hoursthrough the snow. I didn’t stick to the trail when I ran, and now my leg is aching and I am lost in the woods. For a while I hear the river in the distance, and I try to walk toward the sound, but soon it sounds like the river is all around me. Shortly after that, the sound has disappeared, and the forest is silent but for the creaking of trees.
I walk, and I walk, and I walk. Sometimes I pass a rock that is large and dry enough for me to sit on, and so I pause and rest. I do this several times.
Walk, rest, walk, rest.
At some point in the late afternoon, I entertain the notion that I am walking in circles, no farther than ten minutes from that cabin. It feels too hopeful to think I might have walked in a straight line away from the cabin and the ranch, that I might just be a few minutes’ walk from the highway, where I might burst out of trees and onto the side of a busy road, desperately waving my arms.Help!
I never end up reaching the highway.
Instead, I find myself stumbling out of a thicket and into the base of the hill where Noah ran away from me that day, and I let out a low moan. I’m back where I started. I will never escape this place.
I am tired and starving and numb-footed as I walk up the hill, the house and the barn slowly coming into view. Old Caleb is standing by the barn entrance. He watches me as I approach him, pink-cheeked and out of breath.
“Hello,” I say, when I’m close enough.
He squints at me. He doesn’t look furious so much as exasperated. “Where the hell did you go?”
“On a walk,” I say. I hope I look calm. I need a moment inside, in the safety of my bedroom, to pull the covers over my head and slow my breathing and think.
“Well,” Old Caleb says. “Maeve’s fever has broken.”
“Oh.” Of course it did. “Good.”
“I was worried you might’ve taken her with you.” He squints up at the sky, leans over, and spits loudly. Glances sideways at me. “You know she’s not vaccinated.”
I am about to reply, and then a strange sound cuts me off. The sound of an engine. A car is rolling up the driveway. Not a blue truck, but a red Subaru, climbing the hill, rolling slowly through the drops and divots in the bumpy dirt road, until it pulls up to the barn, and stops.
The engine is killed.
A woman steps out.
She’s my clone. She looks exactly like me, except her hair is shorter. But everything else about her is the same: the sharp face, the dark brown eyes. Even the way she walks. Identical.
I stand there and watch as this woman, this uncanny version of myself, approaches me. She’s crossing the driveway, and then she’s passing the chicken coop, and then she’s standing ten feet from us.
She brings a hand to her face to shield her eyes from the sun. “Well,” she says. “I sure love what you’ve done with the place.”
