They rode the half mile to the barns in the back of a rattling Ford pickup. On sharp turns the key sometimes fell out of the ignition. The wind had died down to an occasional blast, sharp enough to pierce through Angie’s coat. Though the sun was weak, the snow on the ground shone. They jolted slowly down the road, past the residences—Yellow House, White House, Ivy House—past the director’s house, past the orchard, which in the summer held beehives. Sheep lifted masked, unsurprised faces to watch them. The llama had matted hair and a narrow, haughty expression. He detached from the flock and jogged mincingly toward the fence.
At the cowshed, the driver turned off the ignition; the truck continued to shake for a minute longer. Angie climbed up onto the rusty ledge of the truck bed, jumped heavily down. Pulling her scarf over her nose and mouth—as she breathed she tasted ice crystals and damp wool—she went around to the passenger-side door. Her hands were clumsy in her leather gloves, and it took three tries to unhook the baling wire that held the door closed. When the wire finally slipped free, she took a few awkward steps backward in the high snow, holding the door open. Sam Manning had been riding in the cab. He clambered down, and then together he and Angie wired the door shut again.
After the snow’s glare, the inside of the barn seemed dim. Written above each stall were the names of the cow’s sire, her dam, the bull she’d been mated with, and then the cow’s own name: molly, maggie, jenny. Angie helped unclip the cows from their long chains and herd them out into the frozen side yard. Jenny went uncomplainingly, but when Angie went back for Maggie, she balked at the doorway. Angie hit her, then set her shoulder against the cow’s heavy haunch and pushed. Maggie set her hooves, tensing back. Her huge eye rolled wildly. Beneath Angie’s cheek, the cow’s coarse hair smelled of rumen, straw, and manure, at once pleasing and abrasive. “Come on,” Angie said, banging the cow with her shoulder. Maggie didn’t budge, and then all at once she gave in and came unstuck. As though it were what she’d intended all along, she trotted out. In the yard, the cows crowded together, standing head to rump, their breath rising in dense white clouds. Angie unzipped her jacket and stood, hands on hips. Clouds of her breath—smaller than the cows’ and more transparent—rose in the icy air.
Back inside, she pitchforked up yesterday’s matted straw. Mixed in were crumpled paper towels, stained purple with teat disinfectant the milkers used. The barn was warm and close; Angie took off her jacket, hanging it on a nail. Another Resident, Betsy, turned on the radio, an ancient black Realistic balanced between two exposed wall studs, dialing until she found a faint heavy-metal song, fuzzed with static.
“No voices,” said Sam Manning.
“No voices,” the team leader agreed. Betsy rolled her eyes, tried to find another station. Finally she turned off the radio.
“They’re all going to talk sometime,” she said. “There’s going to be commercials.”
In silence, they used brooms to sweep the floor clear of the last chaff. Then Sam Manning hosed down the concrete. Sam was more than twice Angie’s age, someone whom—outside the farm—she would never have even known. In this new life, though, he was her friend, her only real one, the only person who laughed when she made a joke instead of looking worried. They’d first found each other on Movie Night because they both voted for videos that lost. They wanted Chinatown instead of Crocodile Dundee, Witness instead of Top Gun, anything instead of Three Men and a Baby. Angie went to the Movie Nights anyway; she had nothing better to do. She and Sam sat in back and made fun of the dialogue.
When Sam was twenty, voices had told him to kill his twin sister, then himself. He’d come to her college dorm and stabbed her in the stomach. She screamed and rolled away and his second thrust went wild, tearing open her arm. He managed to stab her a third time, in the thigh, before the resident adviser’s boyfriend ran in and wrenched the knife away. Sundays, Sam’s sister came to the farm, and they sat together smoking. She was also burly, also iron-haired. Her limp was barely noticeable, but if she pushed up her sleeve, a knotty scar ran from her right elbow down her forearm, almost to the wrist. There had been such extensive nerve damage that she couldn’t use her right hand. It stunned Angie what could be lived around in a family: Surely it shouldn’t be possible, their sitting together on the stone wall by the sheep barn. She’d seen the sister reach for Sam’s lighter, dipping her left hand into his shirt pocket as naturally as if it were her own.
At nine-thirty, they took a break. Hannah drove down from the kitchen, swinging herself out of the truck cab. Her jeans were made up more of patches than the original denim. She reached back into the truck for chocolate chip cookies and a thermos of cider.
The cookies were hot from the oven. The Residents and Staff stood in the lee of the barn, eating the cookies and smoking, ashing into a coffee can of sand. Angie, not a smoker, wandered over to the fence and watched the cows.
Hannah came up beside her. “Why do you think everyone here smokes?”
“Everyone did at the hospital, too. I don’t know why.” Angie wiped the corners of her mouth to make sure she didn’t have chocolate smeared there.
“It drives me—” Hannah cut herself off. “It’s annoying.”
Angie said shyly, “I like your jeans.”
“Yeah?” Hannah looked down, considering them.
Angie’s sweater snagged on the fence. She pulled it free, leaving a wisp of green wool in the rough wood. She rubbed her mouth again, in case there really was chocolate there. Hannah sometimes hung out with her like this for a few minutes when she delivered Morning Snack. Suggesting to herself things she might say to Hannah and then rejecting them, Angie pretended to be wholly absorbed in watching the cows. They looked miserable in the field, barely grazing. Melting ice dripped from the undersides of branches. If she closed her eyes, she could hear the drops all around her, running together into a sound like tap water. She probably looked crazy, standing with her eyes closed. She opened them and said, “It’s almost spring.”
“People say spring’s a hard time at the farm. A lot of people have breaks.”
Angie glanced at her, but Hannah didn’t seem to be remembering Angie as one of the group at risk for breaks. Trying to use the same casual tone, Angie asked, “I wonder why in the spring? I’d think, like, a month ago, when it was so gray all the time. And, you know, cold.”
“Apparently the change does it. In winter people hold together as long as it seems things are going to get better. Then when things do start getting better—I can’t explain it well. We had a training on it. They said until things stabilize again midsummer, April’s the last good month.”
All through lunch, she talked to Hannah in her head. She imagined telling how parts of her past seemed to belong to another person, a crazy girl who broke stuff, tore books apart. After the pool thing, when she’d been admitted to the hospital, they’d thought she was schizophrenic. The first antipsychotic they put her on, Mellaril, had made her more psychotic. It had also made her neck and jaw muscles stiffen so tight that she could barely talk. Sometimes she’d fallen out and been put into Isolation, where she threw herself against the wall until aides arrived to sedate her and the world stretched out thick and flat.
Hannah would say, I can’t imagine you like that. You’re right, that’s totally not you.
Sitting in the TV room, waiting for the Town Trip, she told Hannah silently about her younger brother, the way he sulked and snapped on visits. She said, You’ve seen him, right? and in her head Hannah said, I think maybe. Reddish hair? She confided to Hannah that she hadn’t taken her meds this morning; she hoped it would make her shake less. She was going to take a double dose tonight, as soon as Jess left.
Jess.
She was too wired to sit here. She had half an hour before the van left for Town Trip. Out on the front porch, she pulled her parka tighter around her body and started walking. Wind stirred up small eddies from the surface of the snow. She turned and cut up into the woods.
In the woods, the snow
was deeper. Trees’ black branches rubbed together, moaning. The high snow made walking hard; she stopped to unzip her parka. She thought about lying down to make a snow angel, then—as she started to lower herself—thought maybe there was something crazy about lying down in the snow and straightened and went on.
Hannah lived in one of the small Staff cabins out here in the woods, little houses without plumbing. In the winter Angie had helped deliver wood to these cottages. She’d still been on antipsychotics, but Klonopin at least hadn’t made her crazier like Mellaril had. Her few memories of the insides of the cabins had a dreamy, unanchored quality: a red blanket, a shelf of books, a propped-up postcard of a painting.
The clearing between Angie and Hannah’s cabin was wide and very still. Thin smoke twisted from the chimney. She saw a small brown hawk the moment before it launched itself from a tree into the air. There was the soft thump of snow falling onto snow, the hush, hush of wings. Walking through snow had soaked Angie’s pants to the knees, and she shivered.
Just as she was turning to go, the cabin door opened. Hannah emerged, walked a few feet, drew down her jeans, and crouched. In the woods, everything looked like a pen-and-ink drawing: white snow, gray smoke, black trees and the cold blue wash of shadows at their bases. Hannah seemed drawn with ink too, as she stood again, pulling up her jeans. Short dark hair, the white undershirt she wore, then the closing of the cabin door behind her.
The wind paused. Angie walked toward the cabin. From inside came the chirrup of the woodstove door. A log thrown on the fire, and then a silence that stretched over the clearing to its edge, where the snow disappeared in the bases of trees. Where Hannah had been, the snow was pocked yellow. Angie felt oddly exhilarated. She crouched, using her teeth to pull off her mitten and put her hand above the surface, feeling warmth mixed with the cold air rising against her palm.
The Town Trip was to Sheepskill, thirty miles from the farm. Hannah parked the old van behind the health food store. Hitting the parking lot, the Residents were like a clump of fish being released into a tank, turning disoriented in place for a moment, then separating. Two of the lowest functioners headed together toward Sheepskill’s supermarket. Others walked in the direction of the drugstore, the record store.
Angie lingered near the van. Kicking snow from her boot sole, she said, “Today’s the day I’m meeting Jess.”
“I remember.” Hannah finished writing the names of Residents who had come to town, then tossed the checklist onto the front seat. “Are you nervous?”
Angie’s stomach kept twisting, like a rag being wrung out. “No. I guess a little. I haven’t seen her in a long time.”
“It’ll be fine,” Hannah said, pulling the van door shut. She reached and touched Angie’s arm briefly. Then she took two steps backward, waved. “Go on. It will be fun.”
As a meeting place, Angie had chosen the Daily Grind, Sheepskill’s less popular coffee shop, where they weren’t as likely to run into other Residents. Walking down Main Street, she tried to see the town as Jess might. The stores had high square fronts and faux nineteenth-century signs, or else real 1950s ones. The banked snow was melting, filling the street with gray slush. In front of the gas station was a boy her age with a smudgy mustache, jaw raw with acne. He lifted a mop from a bucket of hot water, rolling the handle between his ungloved hands so the strings flared into a circle, then bent to swab the sidewalk. His body, beneath the blue-gray jacket, was beautiful. In the cold air, clouds of steam rose from the bucket. A handmade sign advertised free maps with a full tank of gas.
The Daily Grind was at the top of a steep hill. The slush made walking difficult; with every step, Angie slid half a step back, arms out to her sides for balance. Even with the hard physical barn work, she’d gained weight on lithium, and she reached the top of the hill breathing heavily. On the café’s porch, while she tried to pull her clothes straight, a woman came out, holding the hand of a little boy. He had hockeyplayer hair, cut very short on top and left long in back. The boy said, “Mom, I want—” and the mother yanked his arm, hard. “I told you, don’t say I want,” she hissed.
Jess stood as Angie came in. Angie’s fear that she wouldn’t recognize Jess had been crazy; she looked more familiar than Angie’s own reflection would have.
Jess’s long hair was pulled back in a ponytail. As she stepped forward, Angie stepped back, then realized Jess had meant to hug her. They bumped together awkwardly, Angie’s hands still in her pockets.
“You look great!” Jess said.
“The coffee’s pretty good here.”
“It’s been so long since I’ve seen you!”
“Do you want some coffee? I’ll get it.”
“No, I’ll get it.” Jess reached back for her purse. “My treat.”
Once, Angie would have said—what? Something sarcastic about Jess’s generosity. She sat, then looked quickly around the café, relaxing when she saw she’d been right: no other Residents. Inside her pockets, Angie’s hands were trembling, despite skipping her meds. She needed to calm down or she’d sound like a mental patient: the response to you look great was not the coffee here’s pretty good.
“Here,” Jess said. “I got you a muffin too.”
If she gripped the cup hard enough, it stilled her hands. The coffee was black, bitter and delicious. The farm didn’t have coffee. On town trips, Residents bought jars of instant and brought them back. At the farm, tablespoons of dried coffee were a currency as valuable as cigarettes, more valuable than real money.
There hadn’t been coffee in the hospital either. The first morning last fall that she’d woken up on the locked ward, she had such a bad caffeine headache she’d shivered and vomited. She’d told the nurses she was dying, she had a brain tumor, she was descended from Scottish kings and she was dying on a shitty filthy motherfucking ward. She took off her clothes and lay down on the floor of the bathroom. The small cold tiles under her cheek had, for a moment, brought her shockingly back—she said her own name to anchor herself, “Angie, Angie, Angie”—but then the nursing aides tried to move her and she’d become terrified, scratching and biting, and that was the first time she’d ended up in Isolation.
Jess said, “Your brother probably tells you everything about school.”
Angie shook her head. Luke didn’t tell her much.
Jess visibly relaxed. She began talking about who had broken up, who had gotten into what college, the swim team. In the café were two geeky junior-high boys playing chess, a woman with a sleeping baby, a middle-aged man sketching. No one had any reason to think Angie was anything other than what she appeared, a girl in jeans, drinking coffee with a friend on a Saturday. She tried to listen to Jess, but her attention was on the street outside the door, willing Residents to stay away. So she wouldn’t turn to look, she held herself stiff. Each time the door opened, she felt herself jerk in her seat. Jess smiled at something she was saying and Angie told herself, Smile. She was relieved to realize that Jess, in her narration of the last three months, wasn’t going to mention why Angie hadn’t been at school. Jess said some of the cheerleaders had been booted off the squad for coming to a game drunk. She laughed. Late, Angie laughed too.
Jess looked down at her cup. She picked it up and swirled it.
Outside, a car moved carefully up the street, headlights on. In the slushy snow, its tires made a sound like ripping silk. It was three-thirty in the afternoon, the light beginning to fade. Jess at last looked up. They smiled at each other helplessly. “More coffee?” Jess asked.
If she drank more coffee she would be sick. She could just hold the cup and not drink. “Sure. I’ll get it.”
“Sit down, sit down.”
She sat down. Her hands were too trembly, anyway, to carry two mugs without spilling.
Jess bustled over to the counter, joked with the girl working. It was Angie, not Jess, who was usually good with strangers, but suddenly Jess had taken on the role of Competent Friend. On the way back to the table, she raised one hand�
�holding a full cup of coffee!—and used the back of her thumb to push hair out of her eyes. She sat down, saying, “I’m so tired.” She bent her head, resting it on her arms.
While her head was lowered, Angie said quickly, “The farm’s like—my parents think I have to be there. The doctor doesn’t even think I have what the first doctor thought I had. No one has a clue, really.” It seemed true as she said it.
Jess sat up. “You must be so pissed.”
“It’s not so bad. People are pretty normal.”
“In your letter you said they were pretty crazy.”
What had she written Jess? “Well, some people. Not most people, though. I’m friends with this girl, Hannah, she’s just taking a semester off from school.”
“So it’s like that? I mean, some people are—some people need to be there, but other people are just …”
“Just there.” For the first time all afternoon, her footing began to feel sure, not just because she’d found a softened, not totally untrue, way to describe the farm but also because, next to Hannah, Jess would seem awkward and unremarkable. “I mean, I wasn’t going to come back to school in the middle of the semester. I think what I had before was a nervous breakdown, trying to do too many things at once. Everyone freaked out, but that was pretty much all it was.”
“You know, that’s what I thought. I mean, it’s not like you’re psycho.”
“The hospital will make you psycho, though.” You weren’t allowed to say words like psycho or crazy at the farm; using them felt like throwing off heavy blankets. “When I was in there, at the hospital, everyone was treating me like I was really sick. My parents were all—” She made her face pinched and solemn. “And everyone was saying I’d have to take meds, medication, forever. You begin believing it.”
Halfway House Page 3
