“I don’t understand,” Caleb says, but I do, and so I walk over to the car and open the back door. Little Maeve peers up at me. “Mama?” On her other side are the boys, limp in their seats, pale with fear. They’ve spent their whole lives preparing for battle, these boys, they’ve been waiting and wishing and planning for enemy intruders, and now, in a single instant, the battle has been waged and won. The boys have lost before they had a chance to pick up their imaginary swords. They are prisoners to the victor, now—or maybe, I think numbly, they’re prisoners who are suddenly set free.
I shake my head of those thoughts, turn away from the boys and look at Maeve. It feels like a cruel trick that the last child I ever had is the first one where the love came easily. “I love you, Maeve,” I say. My tears fall all over Maeve’s face as I kiss her cheeks and forehead and nose. I grab at Noah next to her, but he pulls away. “I love you, I love you, I love you,” I say to them. “It’s not my fault. Do you hear me? Don’t believe what they tell you. Do you hear me, Maevie? Don’t listen to them.”
Maeve doesn’t reply. She won’t remember this. I know that. There’s too much novelty all around her. When I step back, she’s looking around the inside of the car with a blank expression, like all the emotion has been stunned out of her. Finally, her gaze reaches me, and she seems to realize for the first time that I’m not in the car with her. “Mama, come,” she says. She starts to cry.
“I love you, honey. Do you hear me? I love you so much.”
In the background, I can feel Mary and Clementine watching me, silent.
I shut the door, waving brightly at Maeve. Now Clementine is guiding Mary to the passenger seat of her car and helping her in. Mary’s eyes are wider than I’ve ever seen them. Clementine shuts the passenger door. I watch as my daughter leans forward wordlessly and traces her fingers softly along the radio buttons.
Soon all the children in the back seat are crying. I can hear them through the paneled glass: the boys are calling for their papa, Maeve is screaming for her mama. Mary is sitting in the passenger seat, her face as white as the winter sky.
Suddenly I feel sick. I tell myself Mary’s off to something better; that someday not too far from now, she will run through an outdoor shopping mall, laughing and shrieking with other girls her age. She’ll be a normal girl, with normal problems and a normal life.
This is a lie, of course. Mary will never be normal. All our children will suffer, but it is Mary, I think, who will suffer the most.
And then they are leaving.
In one moment, Clementine is telling me that animal controlwill be here shortly for the animals, and in the next minute the car is backing down the hill, Clementine looking over her shoulder to steer, Mary staring at nothing, all three younger children sobbing in the back seat. Finally, right as the car is about to drop out of sight, I realize what I’m supposed to be doing. I fix my expression into a smile and lift my hand into the air. I wave at my babies. I shout lovingly, “Goodbye!”
And then we are alone.
Caleb is standing next to me in his stupid pioneer husband outfit. Impossibly, he looks as lost as I feel. “The children are gone,” he says. “I can’t believe the children are just—gone.”
I wonder: How many disappearing acts can a single family survive?
I look at my husband, who looks sorrier than I’ve ever seen him, and I think:chicken, egg.Lord, I’m so tired of thinking about chickens and eggs.
Lord.I pause.Where is the Lord?I crane my ear toward the sky and strain to listen.
Nothing. I hear nothing. Strange. Now that I think about it, I can’t even remember what He sounds like.
“I think you were right, Caleb.”
He’s still staring at the bump of the hill where Clementine’s car vanished from sight. The dust is still floating in the air. “Right about what?”
“I think,” I say slowly, “that we should’ve gotten a divorce a very long time ago.”
He turns to look at me.
“I think I hate you,” I say.
“I think,” he says slowly, in a stunned sort of voice, “that I might really hate you too.”
I turn back to look at the house. It really does look, from this angle, like a cardboard cutout. Like I could step forward and knock it over if I wanted to.
“I think we should go,” I say suddenly.
“Go? Go where?”
“Away.” Yes. That is right. I nod decisively. “I need to get away from this ranch before I—well, before I lose my mind again.” I can feel it, the force of Clementine’s arrival, how she magnetized all my thoughts into momentary order—and I can feel it just as powerfully, how the momentary order is already shivering and straining from the effort to hold on.
There will be consequences if I leave. But none so great as the consequences of staying.
“Well?” I say impatiently. “Do you want to come with me or not?”
A long moment passes.
