And then suddenly, he’d felt arms around him. He was surrounded by bodies, by the smell of clean sweat; he could feel hot breath and hear laughter. They were in a huddle, he and a half-dozen people, all wearing the same T-shirts. Purple.
He’d designed the Rockets shirt based on that memory. Or he’d had that memory based on the Rockets shirts he would design later?
“For whatever reason,” Reece said, “that day, I leaped forward into what seemed like a better moment with a group of people and this intense feeling of belonging. But it didn’t last long. It’s like my brain was saying, ‘Here’s the buzz,’ and a few seconds later, ‘Here’s the hangover.’”
But that was wrong, too. It didn’t feel like a false high followed by a crash. It felt like ultra-reality: the greater truth behind some curtain normally kept closed. “And on my way back to that moment, I passed through a cloud of something else. Something bad, somewhere just down the stream of time.”
“Something bad. Explain.”
“Panic. Everyone pushing and a few people falling. It’s all a blur. But in the dream, I know. Something’s gone wrong. And it’s not so much a surprise as a feeling, like Here it goes. Like I’ve been waiting for it. Like we’ve all been waiting for it, including you.”
“And I’m there.”
He couldn’t tell if she believed him.
“Yes. And you’re giving me instructions, like I said.”
Ruth’s face was unreadable. “Okay.”
He couldn’t tell if she was upset or just distracted. Pulling her phone out again, she said, “It’s the inspector. There’s a problem. I have to get back to the house right now.”
“Listen. Please. We’ve had a similar experience, Annie included. We thought we were going to die and started heading toward the light.”
“I didn’t see any light.”
“The proverbial light, obviously.”
“If all it took to experience what we did was a person in a traumatic moment and heading toward the proverbial light, then this would happen a lot.”
Reece wished she’d stop fighting his every suggestion. “Maybe it does. But most people who have a near-death experience head back to the past. They review the events of their life like a slideshow, right? My life flashed in front of my eyes, et cetera.” He didn’t mention the endless Google searches and really bad YouTube videos he’d watched on this, just to help him see a pattern. “They go back the way they came—toward the beginning of their lives, not the end.”
Ruth was squinting at him.
“The three of us went forward, for whatever reason,” he said. “We were pulled forward by fear or hope. You wanted to be with Scott, and then you were. I wanted to feel something—surrounded, accepted. And I was. Annie wanted out of that train, and the next thing, she was with a horse she loved. But in all three cases, the good moment turned bad fast, so we didn’t get to that peaceful, happy part before waking up in the hospital room or train. We just got bounced back.”
Reece still couldn’t read her expression. He was helping her make sense of her experience. Why didn’t she look happier?
He tried one last time, “This ability . . . Annie Oakley did something with it. She used deliberate practice to learn to control it.”
“I need some time to think about this.”
“You need time? We don’t have time.” Dream Ruth had told him that. “I’m tempted to stop taking my meds. To have the dream again, to figure out—”
Ruth interrupted, “Don’t go off your meds. I don’t want to be responsible for that.” Then she turned and headed back toward her house. For someone with a bad knee, she was walking fast now. Reece called out to her.
“You know that point in the movie where someone has superpowers but doesn’t own up to it and you want to shout, ‘Let’s go get the bad guy. Get the helicopter. Call the White House.’”
Ruth called back without looking over her shoulder. “In those movies, no one has to deal with home inspectors.”
17
Ruth
"Follow me down here, if you don’t mind?”
Minutes later, Ruth and the inspector stood in front of the water heater, or rather, in front of a stack of folding chairs in front of the water heater. To the side were additional obstructions. Peering into the gloom—and only now, Ruth realized she should have replaced the dead lightbulb over their heads—Ruth recognized a broken vacuum cleaner, an old wooden sled, suitcases that dated to the 1950s, and stacks of cobweb-covered canvases from the year Gwen took a community college oil painting class.
“I’ll need to get in there.”
“Closer to the water heater, you mean.”
“And behind it. As well as around the furnace, in all the crawlspaces, the attic, the garage. Nothing can be closer than two feet to the walls. Didn’t your realtor explain?”
“About staging, yes. And baking cookies to make the house smell better.”
The scent of mildew hung in the air. Half the basement was shrouded in darkness. Ruth could sense the inspector’s smirk. The time for baking cookies was not near.
Ruth squeezed past the folding chairs and started to tug at one of the surprisingly heavy suitcases, but the inspector shook his head.
“You’ve got a big job to do. We’ll need to reschedule.”
She emailed Nieman to ask if he had a street address so she could use a package service instead of USPS, and also whether he could supply a phone number for tracking and insurance, et cetera. She hoped she might be able to track him down that way, to reopen the dialogue she’d never meant to shut down completely. But still, he did not reply.
18
Annie
1905, 1871, 1885, 1901
At times, anger feels like the only force guiding her. It takes her back to the Indian graveyard again and again until her frustration is so great it’s like a dam breaking.
Finally, she opens her eyes in the place of her greatest pain and sorrow.
She sees yellow grass, a wagon track, and the Wolves’ cabin, but only for a moment. As quick as a candle snuffing out, the scene vanishes. Then she is elsewhere: back in the present, or a few years before that, or sometimes at an in-between point—the 1880s, when she was in her mid-twenties, working for Buffalo Bill. When she finds herself at this pivot point, she is comforted slightly by the familiarity of the tents, the sounds and the smells, the presence of Sitting Bull, her friend and confidant. But her young womanhood is only halfway as far as she needs to go.
Annie can’t attest to how many times she is delayed or diverted. She can’t count her journeys any more than a dreamer can chart every foggy shift in a long and tortured dream. She knows only that she has gotten close many times, yet never quite close enough, to do what she intends.
At one point, she describes this taxing time-skipping in a new letter to Herr Breuer, trying to capture the sights and sounds of the dreamlike world that is no dream, a kaleidoscope of disoriented moments.
Rereading her own confused prose, penned in her childish handwriting, she forces herself to consider the matter again. She ponders the question of responsibility. With this new skill of hers, shouldn’t she be able to act out of something beyond personal rage? Shouldn’t she try to do something purely good in the world?
There is one notable attempt, one notable failure.
It occurs to Annie that she should be able to prompt herself, if she can only steel her mind and execute her task with clarity on a day not so very far back in time. She will write a simple letter and make an attempt at changing the course of events. This is not only a civic duty, but a personal one. She is from Greenville, Ohio; the assassin was living elsewhere in Ohio; their president, Mr. McKinley, was from Ohio. It’s all still recent, still very much talked-about, and perhaps still malleable—if time and history are like muddy roads after a rain, soft at first and only hardening later.
/>
In the brief letter, which she mails care of general delivery to the man’s parents, she uses her real name, hoping it will catch his attention. She says that she knows his plan, that he must renounce violence. She does not explain how she knows.
Signing with a flourish, she feels she has fulfilled her obligation, though it does not give her the expected satisfaction. Perhaps, deep down, she knows it can’t be so easy.
When Annie returns to the present day, 1905, she makes inquiries.
McKinley is still dead.
Leon Czolgosz has still shot him.
But not when she assumes—not in June, when Annie is quite sure the assassination took place—but rather later, in September. She asks a stranger on a train. She asks a man selling newspapers. Still not convinced, she asks Frank, when she gets home later that evening and they sit down late to dinner—the first time they’ve seen each other in more than a week.
Her appetite is off, as is Frank’s. Neither of them touches more than a few morsels on their plates. She presses Frank on the point: surely, if the assassination had happened . . .
“Well, of course it happened. What do you mean by that?”
“I only mean that I was sure it happened in June. And didn’t they hang him sometime in July?”
Frank sets down his fork. “How can you forget? He was electrocuted in October. The very same day of our train accident, in fact. The date is seared into my memory.”
“Oh,” she says.
“You look pale.”
“It’s just . . . why should it be the same day?”
Is it some form of punishment for trying to change the past, a message from dark angels, thumbing their noses at her, warning her she’s already gone too far?
“No reason,” Frank says, picking up his fork again. “Pure coincidence. I’m only surprised you’ve forgotten. But there’s something else I want to discuss with you.”
She’s seen this moment coming. She’s dreaded it.
“It was just under two years ago,” he starts carefully, “that we sat down with Fraley and he warned us that we were embarking on a road that could take many years to travel. I believe he said four.”
“Or five.”
“But it seems it will take longer than they first imagined. Our accountant would like to meet with us, the first of the month.”
“I’ll be away.”
Frank looks down at his plate. “Of course.”
“Well, why wouldn’t I be away? I have a trial on the third. I don’t have time to talk to accountants.”
Frank picks a piece of gristle off his plate. Annie hears a scuffling near their feet.
“Please don’t feed the dog under the table.”
“The trials and the accountant are related issues. We’re losing money on this, Annie.”
“Money isn’t the point.”
“Money isn’t the point, up to a point. We can’t let your quest for revenge bankrupt us.”
“Quest for revenge?” She pushes her chair back, ready to stand. She doesn’t bother to point out that nearly all the money she is squandering—if it indeed could be called squandering—is hers. She’s earned it.
“It’s not logical,” he says. “You’ve won most of the trials so far. Nearly everything you do in your life, Annie, you win. But a person can win and still lose, don’t you see that?”
Under the table, Dex barks. He almost never barks.
“You’ve spoiled him rotten while I’ve been away. He climbs up on the bed now!”
“Why shouldn’t he? If I had company . . .”
“Fine, get another dog. Get as many as you’d like.”
“I’d rather have a family.”
“We’re family.”
She starts to tremble. Even though she curls her fists under the table, the shake becomes stronger. They haven’t spoken of this for fifteen years, and then only once, in the Wild West show days, lying side by side in bed, in her performer’s tent in the dark, where she didn’t have to see his face. They’d had an argument about their plans, and she explained—but not really explained—that she wasn’t ready to be a mother. Would never be ready, and also possibly couldn’t be. But she didn’t want to discuss medical issues. Her anatomy was her business. They were talking about love and desire, or its lack. Not everyone is made to be a mother.
“Don’t make me talk about it anymore,” she’d said to him, turning away.
“But you haven’t talked at all. You haven’t made it possible for me to understand.”
He almost left her the next day. She is sure of it. He skipped breakfast, wasn’t in attendance at the two o’clock or the seven o’clock shows. She didn’t see him at dinner, nor back in the tent at 10 p.m.
In any traveling show, there are temptations. Men who drink night after night and play cards and gamble. Beautiful women, in the show and in the crowds. Frank doesn’t drink and claims not to gamble, though he perhaps wagers occasionally. As for women, well, Frank is handsome. Women find his Irish accent and his dark eyes charming, even now. He’d have no trouble finding a new partner in life. He was married and separated before they met—yet another thing they never, ever talk about. He could easily marry again.
“Annie, you don’t look well. Give me your hand.”
When she doesn’t, Frank bangs the table, making the silver jump. “You think I’m talking about money or my own needs, when you’re the one making yourself ill with all this!”
She whispers, “I saw a doctor.”
“I know! Another month spent away from me. As if that’s what our marriage needed. As if that’s what your health needed. Whatever advice he gave you, it was the wrong advice, because you’ve looked worse every day since coming back from that ludicrous trip.”
She grips the edge of her seat and tugs it back toward the table, to indicate her willingness: she won’t leave the room. She’s trying to listen and be reasonable. But she’s also trying to hide her spasming hand under the table.
“You can’t hide what’s happening from me,” Frank says. “I don’t know if it’s the trials or some other preoccupation or some dangerous medicine that Austrian gave you.”
“He gave me nothing,” she says, almost too quiet to hear. “Only permission.”
“What kind of blasted permission?”
“The permission you’d like to withhold from me: to face my past, my long-ago past, from before we met.”
“Face the past? You can’t even remember four years ago, when the president was assassinated!”
Frank looks down at his mostly untouched food. He calmly picks up the plate and places it on the floor. Dex bolts out from under the tablecloth, glances once at Annie, then at Frank, who nods. The dog covers the plate with his curly mop of a head, gorging with abandon.
“Frank!”
But she knows she has controlled many aspects of their household up until now. A man will rebel, in big ways or little ones.
“Are you corresponding with someone you knew before me?”
“Oh, Frank.” If he is talking about men—lovers—she’s had none besides him. She may have beaten him during that first shooting match, but he won her heart and has kept it, always.
He looks disappointed to have those simple possibilities shot down. Still, she thinks she can soothe him. She says, “You used to write me poems, do you remember? I always loved your poems.”
He won’t look at her. His gaze remains fixed on the dog, sitting proudly next to his master’s chair.
“I have a request,” he says. “I don’t need to know what you’re doing—what you’re taking, what you’re drinking or what strange thoughts you are indulging. I don’t know why your hand shakes so badly you’d be challenged to hit a target. I just want you to stop.”
“I won’t stop the trials.”
“Then the other thing. S
top doing whatever is making you like this.”
Dex is looking up at her. She pats her leg. He won’t come. She pats it again and whistles. A small growl, so soft she might be imagining it, sneaks out of his throat.
She can’t believe it. No loyalty. Perhaps she’s overestimated the power of fidelity—in man or beast. Or maybe the dog senses something too. Maybe she looks—smells—different, the experiments making her strange.
“I will stop,” she says finally, “and I will explain, because I love and respect you, because I love everything we’ve created together.” She stands up, dropping her napkin on the table, glaring one more time at Dex, who no longer knows her. “But only when the time is right. Only when I’m done.”
19
Caleb
Monday
Holloway was asking him a long question, the beginning of which he’d missed because he was half asleep. It ended, “She argued for equal pay and even for having women in combat, a wildly uncommon position in the late 1800s, yet she wasn’t an advocate of the vote for women. Any opinions about why that might be?”
He had rested his cheek so hard against his palm that he was sure there was a red handprint on his face now.
“Caleb?” she asked again.
“What?”
“Did you do either of the readings about Annie Oakley to prepare for Ms. McClintock’s visit?”
“Yeah.” He hadn’t read the academic paper. He hadn’t even read the Wikipedia entry. And he was stuck now, entirely distracted, fixated on the name Mrs. Holloway had just pronounced clearly: McClintock.
That was the last name of the girl. The one in the halter top with the dead eyes. But she looked about fifteen or sixteen. Of course, the photo was probably five years old. She might be twenty now. A history expert at twenty-one. Well, that was pretty good.
But she was also dead, supposedly, before she would have had a chance to become an expert at anything. Maybe Vorst had just said that, because he’d cut her off. Disowned her. He seemed the type of guy to do that, just as he’d suddenly gone cold on Caleb—thank God—after the summer.
Annie and the Wolves Page 13
