There are trails all around us. Well-trodden and marked and maintained by Old Caleb and the neighbors. The markings I should look for are triangles, carved into the bark of the birch trees. Those will lead me straight to the neighbors’ house. (Amazing: in a single sudden stream of language, Mary has turned the labyrinth of this world into a neatly organized map.) It will take several hours, she warns me, maybe much longer. The last time she went, she was younger, and it seemed to take forever to get there. She doesn’t trust her own concept of time, and anyways, I still walk very slowly. I should plan to be gone for the rest of the day, at least. “I’ll shut the bedroom door and tell Pa you have a fever, too. He won’t want to catch it—he’s terrified of illness. That’ll give you at least a day, maybe longer.”
“So you’ve been there before? The neighbor’s house?”
“Once,” she says. “Or I think I have.” She pauses, frowning. “I remember a house like this one, only different. It was nicer. It must have been theirs.”
On the porch, Mary says, “You’re going to come back, right?”
I turn to look at her. Her eyes are bright and wet. So she knows, or at least suspects, what I’m thinking. I wonder what will happen to her once I’m gone. What will happen to all of them. What will happen to the chicken, and the cow, and the horse. The sock puppets. The kitchen knives. “Of course,” I say. “Of course I’ll come back.”
“Good.” She’s suddenly busy tying the straps of my pack. “Because Maeve would miss you terribly if you went away.”
I close my eyes. A tear falls down my cheek.I hope these girls are not hallucinations.And also, just as fiercely:I hope they are.
A finger brushes the tear from my cheek.
“Go,” Mary says.
I open my eyes. I do as she says: I go. Down the steps, past the chicken coop, then the barn, and suddenly the entire ranch is behind me. I’m past the patch of dirt where Old Caleb slapped me, and then I’m past the base of the hill where Noah ran screaming from me, and then I’m farther than I’ve ever been. I don’t turn around, but I feel Mary watching me. Willing me forward with her gaze.
52
The next morning,I opened my eyes and said, “It was Shannon.”
Next to me, Caleb made a piggish snuffle. Rolled over onto his side, dead asleep. It was well before dawn. The room was pitch-black.
“It was Shannon who told Clementine what a tradwife is, because she needed Clementine’s help.”
Snore.
“She’s been gathering evidence, Caleb. All this time, that’s what she’s been doing. That’s why she stayed.”
“Three more minutes,” Caleb mumbled.
“She gave our daughtera fucking phone.”
Nothing. Always nothing.
I lay in the darkness and fumed.
Overnight, the final puzzle piece clicked together. I was staring wildly into the black, my brain tick-tick-ticking away, when I remembered it: Shannon asking for a new phone. Saying hers broke.
Liar.
The phone didn’t fall into a puddle. Weren’t the latest phones water-resistant, anyways? No: Shannon got a new one so she could give her old one to Clementine.Want to know about oceans, Clemmie? Want to know why Mama spends so much time on her phone? Want to know what other kids call their mothers? It’s Mom. Want to call her Mom?
I thought back on every moment I had stood there like an idiot,smiling, while Shannon filmed the horrors unfolding around me. The workers in the fields:cla-chink.The pesticide barrels, hidden beneath a wool blanket behind the barn:cla-chink.The children screaming and crying:cla-chink.TheMade in Chinastickers:cla-chink.
I’d been watching Shannon closely for months now. But my daughter? I hadn’t so much as glanced at her, and she had access to every room. She had been watching me closely, logging my every move, for twelve years. It wasn’t Shannon, but Clementine, who knew exactly how to capture me.
A few minutes after six, I knocked on Clementine’s door.
“Come in,” she called.
The lights were on when I stepped inside. Clementine was sitting on her bed, already dressed for the day, the covers already made up beneath her. There was a book in her lap, but she had set it down when I entered, and I couldn’t see the title.
She was thirteen years old.A little Natalie,Amelia liked to say. But now, for the first time, I found a strangely appraising expression in my daughter’s gaze, and I saw my father-in-law in her face, too.
“What is it?” she said, instead ofGood morning.“What do you need?”
