The Wildlands

by Abby Geni

  “I want y’all to leave,” she said, summoning the tone she used when she wanted her sisters to obey her instantly, without question.

  12

  The last time Darlene had seen Tucker was in the kitchen of No. 43 on a moonless evening. She remembered that night often, against her will. Sometimes it cropped up in her dreams: Tucker’s stentorian voice, his face burning with anger, his torso as slender and erect as a sapling.

  The fight had not started as a fight. Darlene had been at the kitchen table when Tucker came home from a friend’s house. Cora and Jane were asleep in their shared bedroom. The clock ticked languidly. When the front door opened, Darlene did not look up. She did not know Tucker was in a bad mood until he hurled a handful of mail onto the floor beside her.

  “Look,” he said. “More blood money.”

  He was glaring at her, his hair disheveled from the wind.

  After a moment, Darlene stood up from the table. She bent over and gathered up her brother’s mess.

  “Two checks for you today,” he said. “Quite a haul.”

  She took her time responding. Among the catalogues and bills, there were, indeed, two envelopes that appeared to be payment for interviews—one from a magazine, one from a TV station. Darlene knew better than to open them with Tucker glowering over her shoulder.

  “Two checks for us,” she said. “All of us. So we can eat.”

  He disapproved. She was well aware of this. For the past month, ever since she had made the difficult decision to allow the media into their lives, Tucker had been mulish and withdrawn. He refused to participate in a single interview, even though his presence would have allowed Darlene to negotiate for more money. He dropped snide comments and gave her the cold shoulder. (He did not, however, seem to blame Jane and Cora one bit. Darlene was both grateful and irritated about this.) Whenever the McCloud family was featured in the pages of a magazine, an advance copy would be mailed to them. Darlene learned to hide these from Tucker, who would throw them away if he got to them first. He bluntly refused to watch his sisters on TV or listen to their voices on the radio. He would leave the house instead.

  Darlene had indulged him the way she always indulged his tantrums—quietly, gracefully, holding the image of their mother in her mind. She knew she was in the right; the moral high ground offered her a lofty perspective. Daddy never invested in life insurance and amassed little in the way of savings. On her own, Darlene had scraped together enough to buy the trailer. After the family’s most recent interview, people from all over the country sent donations. Some items were helpful: nonperishable foods, a set of new dishes, and hand-me-downs for the girls. A few generous souls sent money. Darlene also received things she could not use, either because their condition was too poor (cracked glassware, broken toys, and what appeared to be bloodstained sheets) or because they were too nice for her current life (a brand-new espresso machine that she immediately sold online). Little by little, she was rebuilding their lives out of nothing.

  The situation would have been easier, she knew, if she and her family were still church members. The religious community looked after its own. But Daddy had cleaved away years ago, and Darlene was a loyal daughter.

  Right after the tornado, the pastor had been a constant presence. He asked Darlene to join his prayer circles, asked if she would be there for Wednesday-night Bible study or the Sunday service. He sent his bright-eyed volunteers to offer her pamphlets of scripture that she might find helpful in this trying time. The church brigade, Daddy would have called them. Darlene was wise enough not to let her true feelings show. Like her father, she always paid lip service to the received wisdom: Thank God. Bless you. I’ll pray for y’all too. But in her heart of hearts, she did not believe in the existence of a soul or the afterlife. There was no all-knowing, omnipotent deity watching over Mercy, and Darlene did not appreciate the pastor’s sanctimonious brand of goodwill.

  Once the McClouds were featured in the media, of course, the church brigade withdrew. Along with everyone else in Mercy, the pastor now kept his distance.

  “Are you hungry?” Darlene said, tucking the envelopes into her purse. “There’s some mac and cheese in the fridge. Jane made it, so it might be a little soggy.”

  Darlene moved toward the table, but her brother blocked her path. The expression on his face brought her up short. This was not just snippiness, after all. Tucker appeared to be furious.

  “You’re not even sorry, are you?” he said.

  “Sorry for what?”

  “For the money,” he said. “For what you’ve done to us.”

  Gently but firmly, she took hold of his shoulders and shifted him out of her way. She sat down, showing with her averted gaze that she was busy, that she did not want to have this conversation now. But Tucker did not budge. He loomed over her, waiting.

  It was only a few months after their father’s death. His loss had left a wound in Darlene’s chest that felt physical, a perpetual ache. She did not know how he died, where his body ended up, and in the absence of certain knowledge she often found herself speculating. The tornado offered plenty of clues about how Daddy might have perished—broken trees, overturned cars, and a teapot that had been flung so hard into a brick wall that it mushroomed into a deformed gong and embedded itself inextricably in the stone. Despite herself, Darlene had considered all the possibilities. Her father might have been decapitated by flying debris. He might have been picked up and spun so fast that he suffocated, unable to inhale against the terrible wind. His body might have been hurled into the canopy of a forest or deposited in a riverbed. He might have been carried high into the icy wasteland of the stratosphere, crystallizing like a snowflake among the clouds. He might still be up there.

  There had been no funeral. Loved ones were supposed to leave remains—ashes in an urn, a body in the ground, something to hold, visit, mourn over. The funeral director tried to talk Darlene into buying and burying an empty coffin “to give y’all a chance to say goodbye,” but she refused. She did not want to put her siblings through such an eerie pantomime. She could not afford it anyway.

  For the past three months, Darlene had waited for the fact of her father’s death to reach every corner of her mind. She had been through this process when Mama died; she knew how it would unfold. Right now, each morning was its own little funeral. She would wake up and listen for Daddy’s footsteps, sniff the air for his pipe smoke, open her eyes, and remember. Every morning she lost him, and the house, and her college education all over again. Every morning she expected to be back in her own bed, beneath the comforter that was precisely the violet of the sky at sunset, looking up at the ceiling decorated with glow-in-the-dark stars. She was not quite sure who she was without a closet full of her clothes, her books on the shelves, her posters on the walls, all the physical manifestations of her former identity.

  She had lost, too, the little farm she adored. The old gray stallion was her friend for a decade. She whispered her secrets to Mojo. She checked his hooves and brushed his flanks. She smiled at his foibles—his inability to recognize her when she wore a cowboy hat, his tendency to startle at a particular fence post that stood at a slight angle, and the feisty mood that sometimes induced him to run flat out in a whinnying frenzy. He would lead the mare and colt behind him, both caught helplessly in his wake, neighing too without knowing why, three horses pelting madly for no reason at all. It used to make Darlene laugh.

  More than this, Mojo had known her mother, which was a source of comfort. Darlene would sometimes talk to him about Mama, which she could never do with Daddy, who would begin to dab at his eyes, or Tucker, who would cut the conversation short. Mojo never got teary or impatient. He just listened, letting Darlene lean against his warm throat, murmuring memories in his ear. She lost the hens she had fed as a young girl at her mother’s side. She lost the herd of cows she had known for years, strolling among them whenever she felt anxious, letting their mild blankness wash over her. Their easy, empt
y minds infused her own like a kind of meditation.

  Darlene knew the whole family was in shock. It affected everyone differently. Jane was operating in a stupor. Cora, too young to really understand, was more or less herself, albeit bored and cranky, as if she had only woken up to the world once the tornado arrived, as if that day in the shelter was her first memory.

  But it was Tucker who worried Darlene the most. Something was happening to him—something she could not identify. He was speeding up, growing more intense by the day. Their great loss had created a mechanism inside his person—buried in his chest or the core of his brain—and it was always humming. She could practically see the vibration of the engine beneath his skin.

  Darlene was doing her best to be patient. As usual, she could grasp the big picture and he could not. She had lost as much as her brother, as much as anyone in Mercy. But someone needed to keep the family together. Someone needed to lead them to another life, and it had fallen to her to do so. Tucker could frown and snipe all he liked, but it would not put food on the table.

  Now Darlene picked up her pen. With a flourish, she started making a list of errands. Then she glanced up at Tucker, who seemed unaware of the tacit messages she was sending.

  “I was just at Louie’s house,” he said in an accusatory tone.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “His mom made us dinner, and then she stared at me during the entire meal. Like she was about to start crying. Like I was the most miserable thing she ever saw. She kept saying she would pray for me.”

  Darlene pursed her lips.

  “The way people look at us,” Tucker said, with a wrench in his voice. “I can’t hold my head up out in the street.”

  She glanced at the bedroom door. She hoped the girls were sleeping soundly. She did not want them to see Tucker like this.

  “‘The saddest family in Mercy,’” he quoted in acid tones. “You agreed to that. You let them print that about us. Literally anything else would have been better. We could’ve been the toughest family. Or the smartest. The strangest, maybe.”

  “I didn’t write that headline,” she said. “I don’t have control over everything.”

  “You let those reporters into our life. You let Cora go on the air.”

  “I had to.”

  “You didn’t—”

  “I did!” The words came out louder than she intended. She took a breath, lowered her voice. “There was no money. Do you understand that? There was nothing.”

  The fridge kicked into gear, a shuddering groan. The sound made both of them pause, glancing toward the appliance as though awaiting its commentary.

  “I’m not sorry,” Darlene said. “Not for any of it.”

  Tucker blinked at her.

  “I didn’t do anything wrong,” she said.

  “Seriously?”

  She waved a hand around the interior of No. 43. “We have a roof over our heads. We have a TV. We have silverware. How do you think I paid for all that?”

  “Blood money,” he said.

  She snorted. She could not help it.

  “Don’t be so dramatic,” she said. “Whose blood? What does that even mean?”

  “It’s the principle of the thing. You have no principles at all, do you?”

  Darlene closed her eyes, once again picturing her mother’s face. She heard the wind in the trees, the chug of the fridge, the knocking in the pipes as the toilet refilled. All the sounds of the trailer park were still foreign to her, each one new enough to catch her attention.

  It was just her and Tucker now—the elders of the family. She felt as though they were playing house. Any minute now, their father might interrupt their game, calling them away, returning order to the universe.

  “You know what?” she said. “I was supposed to leave for college yesterday.”

  Darlene stood up from the table. She and Tucker were the same height, their eyes lining up precisely.

  “It’s orientation week at OU,” she said. “Daddy was going to drive me down. I was supposed to be settling into my dorm right now.”

  “Damn.”

  “It was still on my calendar. I never erased it.”

  “Poor Darlene,” Tucker said softly.

  There was a tightness in her chest. She kept her eyes averted. If she saw any sympathy in her brother’s face, she knew she would cry.

  “Even now, we’re not out of the woods,” she said. “All that ‘blood money’ just barely got us on our feet. You need to get a job. Part-time for the moment. You’ll work on the weekends and after school. You have to graduate, and I have to figure out how we’re going to pay the utility bills this month. We’ve got to feed the girls. That’s all that matters. Just surviving.”

  There was a long, crystalline silence. Tucker shifted his weight, bouncing on the balls of his feet.

  “This can’t be what happens to us,” he said. His tone was almost pleading. “This can’t be it.”

  Darlene wanted her father. Not for the first time, she wished for Daddy with all her might. He would have been able to settle them both down. Daddy had been a silent man by nature, but he exuded an intense calm. His mere presence would have helped. Without him, the chemical mixture of the family was unbalanced. Daddy’s placidity was necessary to douse Tucker’s spark and soothe Darlene’s restlessness. She did not know what to do without her father. She was not sure how to go on living in the world without him.

  “Do you believe that everything happens for a reason?” Tucker said.

  “No,” she said, with some force.

  “Well, I do,” he said. “I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately. Trying to keep my brain busy. Have you ever heard of the Anthropocene Mass Extinction?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “There have been five mass extinctions in the history of life on earth. Each time, the planet has been stripped of almost all its living things. Thousands of species dead. Did you know that?”

  “No.”

  “And it’s happening again, right now. This time, though, it’s not a natural disaster. It’s us. That’s what Anthropocene means: the Age of Humans.”

  Darlene stared at him. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about having a purpose. Finding meaning.”

  He made a strange gesture, spreading his arms wide, the fingers vibrating.

  “Maybe we can’t understand what a disaster is,” he said. “Not really. Not until we actually experience one. It’s about perception, I guess. What happened to us—the tornado—it was some kind of alarm bell. There has to be meaning in it.”

  His tone was musing and sad. For a moment, Darlene thought the argument was over. That they had made it through to the other side. She yawned surreptitiously behind her hand. The sofa was already made up, and her pillow beckoned. Her brother’s sleeping bag was unfurled on the floor. They had agreed to take turns on the couch. Jane and Cora—growing girls—would need the only bed. Darlene was about to suggest that they turn in when Tucker spoke.

  “Daddy would never have let you do what you’ve done,” he said, his voice icy. “He would have found some other way.”

  Darlene took an involuntary step backward.

  “What did you just say to me?” she whispered.

  “If he were here, he would have stopped you. He’d be ashamed of you.”

  “Tucker,” she said, and faltered.

  “But Daddy isn’t here, is he? Do you know why?”

  She felt a sob erupt from her chest. Hot tears singed her cheeks, and she dashed them away with the back of her wrist.

  “The tornado,” she said. “A force of nature.”

  “It wasn’t nature,” Tucker said. “It was you.”

  The words landed like a blow, making her gasp.

  “It’s your fault,” he said. “You kept me in the shelter that day. You stood in front of the door. I wanted to find Daddy. I begged you to let me go.”

  “My fault,” s
he repeated, a blank echo.

  “There was still enough time,” Tucker said, his voice rising. “I could have saved him. You were the one who said no. You let him die.”

  For an instant, Darlene was back in the shelter. The smell of rain and lightning. The commotion of wind. The rough pressure of the door against her spine. She remembered staring around the cramped space at her siblings as Tucker hovered wild-eyed in the middle of the room.

  It had been one of the proudest moments of her life. She blocked the exit with her body. She did what Daddy would have wanted her to do. There was no doubt in her mind about that.

  Now she snatched up her to-do list from the table, crumpled it into a ball, and flung it into Tucker’s face. It bounced off his temple. He flinched away a second too late, then lifted a hand to his head in surprise.

  “I saved your life,” she cried.

  “You think so?” His mouth twisted into a sneer. “Is that what you tell yourself so you can sleep at night?”

  “We got to the shelter maybe two minutes before the tornado. Do the math. You’re only here now because of me. Is that what you blame me for? Keeping you alive? Keeping all of us alive?”

  “Daddy was alone,” Tucker roared. “That’s how he died—scared out of his wits, thinking we abandoned him. Two minutes? Two minutes would have been plenty of time for me to save him. You’re goddamn right I blame you.”

  Things happened quickly after that. The argument flared from a lit match into a forest fire. Now, looking back, Darlene remembered screaming as she had never screamed before. The anger building since her father’s death came out in an uncontrolled tide. She remembered every word she and Tucker threw at one another. The walls seemed to shake with them. She remembered stamping her foot. Slamming her palm on the tabletop. Throwing a pen at his chest. They fought as only siblings could fight—with the brutality of familiarity. They knew each other’s weak spots. Soon both of them were crying, yelling through the sobs.

  “I’ll never forgive you,” he shouted at last. “You always think you know best, Darlene. That’s what killed Daddy.”