The Wildlands

by Abby Geni

  At first, Darlene did not even hear her ringer. By the time she fumbled in her purse, located her cell phone, and pulled to the side of the road, the rain had picked up, hammering on the roof.

  “I’ve got news,” Roy said. His voice was slightly muffled. “They’ve been spotted.”

  “Repeat that,” Darlene said sharply.

  “Tucker and Cora. A definite sighting.”

  “Where? When?”

  “It was one of the towns we marked. Black Rock, New Mexico. About two hours ago.”

  Darlene put the car in park and removed the key from the ignition. Jane was staring at her, twirling the tip of her braid in agitation. The street was wide and lined with skinny saplings. A mailbox on the corner was in the process of changing color beneath the rain, darkening and glistening.

  “How—” Darlene began. “And did they . . . What exactly—”

  “Cora stole a candy bar,” Roy said.

  “A candy bar?”

  “They were in a convenience store . . .” A papery rustling, as though he were checking his notes. “Tucker bought a few things. A water bottle, some gum. The guy behind the counter noticed that there was a kid by the door. She put a candy bar in her pocket as she was leaving. He ran out to stop her, but they were already gone. So he called the police.”

  Rain smashed against the windshield, mottling and distorting the landscape. The canopy of the tree overhead swirled like a cubist painting, chopped into shards of fragmented pigment. Darlene passed a hand over her eyes.

  Roy was still talking. “Normally the cops wouldn’t bother much with something so small. They’d make a report and stick it in a file someplace. But when they heard it was a man and a child—”

  “Right.”

  “There was a security camera over the door. A squad car went around right away. They got the footage, and they called me as soon as they were certain. They sent me a still frame. It’s Tucker. It’s definitely Tucker.”

  “Oh my God.” Darlene sagged forward, resting her temple against the steering wheel. Jane’s breathing seemed abnormally loud, grating like sandpaper on wood.

  “The FBI has been informed,” Roy said. “This is a concrete lead, so they’ll help us. They’ll drop a net around Black Rock. The word has gone out all over New Mexico. This could be it. Tucker’s close to the Arizona border, but I don’t think he’ll get there.”

  The rain dwindled and stopped. The car windows were speckled with moisture, already evaporating in the heat. Soon enough, the sidewalks would be scorched clean, the sky clear, the clouds burned away into wisps.

  “We were right,” Roy said, his voice vibrating with pride.

  “We were.”

  “Goddamn.”

  “I should get on a plane,” Darlene said. “The closest airport would be Albuquerque, right? I can be there in a couple of hours.”

  “Do nothing,” he said firmly. “Remember the girl in the Red River? Let’s be sure this time.”

  “I should get on a plane,” she repeated.

  “Go home. Wait for my word. I’ll be in touch as soon as I can.”

  AN HOUR LATER, DARLENE LAY on the couch with Jane. The TV was on, but both of them were glazed and distracted. Darlene was not even wearing her glasses; at the moment she preferred the world out of focus.

  Then her phone buzzed on the coffee table. There was no message, just an image. Roy had texted her what appeared to be a still frame from the security video. Jane leaned in to see the screen too.

  It was Tucker. Unmistakably, unquestionably. Darlene felt a moan rise from her belly. The shot was grainy, taken from above. Tucker did not seem to be aware of the camera. His hair was close-cropped and dark, no more ponytail. His brow seemed beaky from this angle, his eyes lost in a pool of shadows. He was holding out a few bills, but something appeared to be wrong with his hand. Darlene couldn’t tell if the distortion was in the image or his flesh. Not enough digits.

  After a moment, she realized someone else had been captured in the picture too. An unfamiliar child was framed in the background, a young boy with skinny calves, a pigeon-toed stance, and untied shoes.

  Jane turned away, wiping her eyes and sniffling. Darlene looked at the image again. She stared. She brought the phone closer.

  The boy was Cora. Darlene gasped as this fact became clear. She recognized her sister’s torso, her hunched shoulders, her knobby knees. The harsh light of the convenience store had turned Cora’s cheekbones into triangles; Darlene had seen that effect before when her sister was photographed in too much glare. It was definitely Cora. But she was dressed in cargo shorts and a boy’s T-shirt. And her hair—her hair! The long brown ringlets were gone, shorn into a sad buzz cut. The contours of her legs suggested that she had lost a few pounds. She did not have a few pounds to lose.

  “What has he done to you?” Darlene whispered.

  Jane glanced at her. Darlene laid her phone facedown and leaned back into the pillows, her mind aglow with painful ideas.

  She tried to conjure up an image of where Tucker and Cora might be at this moment. She could not visualize what the day-to-day experience of their life on the run was like. For a while, she had worried that her sister would die in Tucker’s company—not out of any active malevolence on his part, merely neglect and bad judgment. But Cora had been on the road with Tucker long enough now that it seemed she might survive his influence. Physically, at least. What was happening to her mind was another matter entirely.

  There was no question that Cora had been a participant in dreadful things. Arson, vandalism, and murder—and those were just the incidents Darlene knew about. The extent of her sister’s compliance was something Darlene could not fathom. She pictured Tucker working on Cora’s essence like rust on metal, corroding and weakening her. Bringing her into his state of being. Putting his words in her mouth. Hacking off her hair. Dressing her in different clothes. Making her like him—an activist, an outsider to their species.

  Darlene heard Roy’s voice again, reverberating in her mind. A young boy, the witness said. So calm. Watching the place burn to the ground.

  All this time, Darlene had been worried about the wrong things. Now she knew: she had not been worried enough.

  36

  She waited. She waited for hours. She fell asleep waiting and woke on the couch with a crick in her neck and Jane piled against her. Darlene checked her phone and saw that Roy had sent three messages. Nothing yet. Then: No word. Finally: Hang in there, babe. She closed her eyes again.

  The rest of the weekend dragged. Jane asked to skip soccer practice for the first time in memory. She wanted to be around family, she said; nobody else would understand. Darlene went to work and came home without recalling anything from her shift. On Sunday, she gave the trailer a thorough cleaning. Sometimes she still imagined that she could smell Tucker’s blood in the bathroom grout. She washed the windows and attacked the musty void beneath the kitchen sink. She tried not to text Roy too often. She tried not to stare at her phone. She kept it in her pocket and experienced half a dozen phantom messages while scrubbing the shower stall, feeling it buzz against her thigh and peeling off her rubber gloves in a frenzy, only to find the screen blank.

  In the evening, she and Jane stayed up late once more, watching a reality show. Darlene took the couch while her sister lay on the floor, phone in hand, legs balanced against the wall. The air sparkled with the tang of cleaning solvents. The moon poured through the kitchen window like a searchlight.

  “They’re doing everything they can, aren’t they?” Jane said.

  “Yes,” Darlene said. “The FBI are on it. Finally.”

  “Roy will let us know if there’s any news, won’t he?”

  “Of course.”

  It was the tenth time they’d had the same conversation in the past hour, word for word.

  “I miss Cora,” Jane said.

  “I know. I keep buying her favorite cookies. Those weird oatmeal things. They
’re just piling up in the cabinet. I can’t seem to take them off the list.”

  Jane sighed. “I woke up the other day and wanted to take Cora bowling. I don’t know why. I made a whole plan in my head. It was a while before I remembered.”

  Darlene scraped her fingers through a bowl of popcorn, gathering up the last few kernels.

  “I used to think our life was pretty shitty,” Jane said. “No more Daddy. No more house or farm. No more college for you.”

  Darlene nodded. The map of the United States, marred by pushpins, lurked on the wall, a silent presence.

  “I want to go back to the shitty life we had before,” Jane said.

  IN THE MORNING, ROY STOPPED by before work. Darlene was standing at the window, washing the breakfast dishes, gazing at the dewy sky, the air hung with curtains of flaxen heat. Jane was in the shower when Roy parked outside. As Darlene watched, he climbed out of the car and headed toward the house. His shoulders were bowed, his expression defeated. Even the burnished umber of his skin seemed somehow diminished.

  In that moment, Darlene knew exactly what he was going to tell her. Something about the leads going cold. Something about the FBI’s caseload. Something about hope. For a moment, she was almost too weary to breathe. The greater mechanism of the law was giving up on them again. All their efforts had come to nothing.

  Roy knocked, and she let him in. When he began to speak, she preempted him, touching his lips with a forefinger. She marched over to the map of America, still bristling with pushpins. Barefoot, dripping suds on the floor, Darlene removed it from the wall. Roy stood aside, watching her with one hand tucked nervously in his pocket. She wrestled the bulletin board through the front door. She strode out into the sunlit morning, marched over to the ravine, and flung the map away with all her strength, casting its shadow over the creosote and landing with a satisfying crunch of broken branches.

  37

  A buzzing noise. Darlene turned over, swaddled in sleep. The vibration went on and on as she pulled her mind upward out of dreams, like a swimmer breaking into the open air. She thought it was a cicada—a dozen cicadas in Roy’s bedroom. Eventually she remembered that she had silenced her ringer but left her phone on vibrate.

  The call was coming from an unknown number. Darlene blinked, trying to collect her wits. Morning light curled in the curtains. It was just before dawn.

  “Hello?” she muttered.

  “Why didn’t you come?” a voice said, in lieu of a greeting. A reedy, falsetto complaint. A child’s plea.

  Darlene was standing up before she realized she had moved. She glanced around and saw that she was now in the middle of the room, one arm extended toward the wall. Her spine was rigid, her breath tight.

  “Is that you?” she said. “Where are you?”

  “I thought you would come,” Cora said. There was a sound that might have been a sob or a cough: a sputtering exhalation ripe with phlegm.

  “What do you mean?” Darlene said.

  “I made sure there was a security camera. I took the candy.”

  “You . . .” Her voice tapered away, her mouth opening and closing without sound. “You did that on purpose?”

  “I thought you would come,” Cora repeated plaintively.

  “I tried,” Darlene said desperately. “We all did. We tried so hard. Oh, Cora.”

  There was a shift in the light, the sun topping some exterior threshold, and the room brightened suddenly, the dingy shapes of flowers in the wallpaper blooming into vivid color. Darlene saw her shadow in the garden, illusory and gray.

  “He’s acting so strange,” Cora said. Each vowel was moist. “He’s planning something new.”

  “Tucker?”

  “He says something big is going to happen. I don’t know what.”

  “Cora, please, you need to get away from him. Can you find someone, anyone, who can help you?”

  “I don’t feel good. I don’t know where I am.”

  Then a squeal of static blared. Darlene jerked the phone away from her head. There was a clatter, a cacophony of indecipherable squawks—maybe Tucker’s angry voice, maybe some mechanical dysfunction—and the line went dead.

  Darlene tried to scream, but the sound caught in her throat. The air in her lungs felt as solid as clay. In that instant, she pictured all the gateways and apertures she had encountered over the past few months: every TV and computer and phone, even the radio in the car, a hundred interstices through which she had glimpsed her brother, heard about her sister. Gazing at the screen in her hand, Darlene imagined that it was not a blank rectangle, but a closed door. For an instant, the illusion was almost complete, as though somehow she could step through to the other side.

  AS THE SUN CLIMBED THE sky, Darlene and Roy sat in the backyard, curled together in a single lounge chair. August was on its way out. Flickers of red and gold were visible among the branches overhead. The morning air was cooler than it had been in weeks. The row of houses blocked the rising sun, the backyard filled with dreary shadows. The sky was a stretch of alabaster.

  “She did it on purpose,” Darlene said. “She was hoping to get caught. She said so.”

  “I know, babe.”

  She was limp in his lap, too heavy with sorrow to even hold up her head. Roy reached in his pocket for a cigarette.

  “I let her down,” Darlene said. “I failed her.”

  “No, no,” he said, lighting up.

  “What’s going to happen? Tucker’s planning something big. That’s what Cora said. Bigger than arson. Bigger than shooting somebody.”

  Roy exhaled a stream of smoke out of the corner of his mouth.

  “Cora’s sick,” Darlene said. “You should have heard her coughing. She needs me, and I’m not there.”

  “You are,” he said. “You were right on the other end of the line.”

  “Tucker cut her hair. He dressed her up like a boy. I barely recognized her in that picture. Why would he do that?”

  “Crazy as a bedbug,” Roy muttered.

  “I hardly recognized her.”

  Darlene knew she was repeating herself. The backyard was a dingy box, the grass unkempt and yellow. A wooden fence stood tall, keeping out any glimpse of the neighbors’ houses, creating the illusion of solitude. Roy’s mother had been a gardener, and her terra-cotta pots remained where she had left them, now filled with pebbles and weeds. Darlene was still dressed in her pajamas, Roy in a ratty old cotton robe.

  “What’s Tucker planning?” she said, more to herself than anything. She was a little surprised when Roy answered:

  “He’s going to do whatever he’s going to do.”

  “And then something else will happen,” Darlene said.

  She heard the ring of her own voice—stronger, brighter. Roy seemed to notice the change in tone too; he shot her a questioning look.

  “It’s something my dad used to say,” she said. “I’d forgotten.”

  She closed her eyes. A memory was rising up from the gray depths, no longer consigned to the void, clearer and clearer. For the first time in a long while she heard her father’s hoarse, smoky baritone in her mind. And then something else will happen. He said this many times throughout her childhood, offering it like a gift whenever she was worried about a bad grade or fighting with Tucker. He always spoke the words in the same way—as though they brought him immense solace. Darlene never quite understood his meaning, but she was calmed by the simple fact that he was trying to comfort her.

  “And then something else will happen,” she whispered.

  She buried her face in the hollow of Roy’s collarbone and stayed there even as the sun mounted the row of houses, flooding the backyard with light. There was nothing as irrepressible as dawn—the wind infused with sudden heat, the birds waking up, the promise and threat of yet another day.

  THE WILDLANDS

  38

  We came at last to California, a place where summer never ended.

  Our n
ew home was a mausoleum on a hilltop, an imposing marble structure with flagstone steps and angel figurines on the roof. There was a row of iron portals with corpses inside. The floor was chilly and rough to the touch, and the air smelled of mud and something else, something sour. The darkness had a musty, eternal quality—a cold cavern where the sun never penetrated.

  The graveyard spanned a vast stretch of land on the outskirts of a strange new city. The sunlit headstones were ringed by a forest of deciduous trees. Unlike the oaks and elms back home in Mercy, these were unaffected by the seasons, their leaves perpetually green. A few incongruous palms stood here and there among the graves. There was something festive, even silly, about their long stubbled necks and tufted heads in this somber, quiet place.

  At the far edge of my view was the ocean. I had never seen it before, and I could not make sense of its size and grandeur. It was not a pond, not a lake, but a second sky, bluer and more chaotic than the one above it. I spent hours each day staring at the distant heave and flux of waves, the rumpled patterns of light.

  In California, I was often on my own. Tucker had found a job of some kind, but he would not say much about it. He left every morning at dawn wearing a green jumpsuit, strolling away between the gravestones with a wave. He would fetch our new vehicle from a side street—a silver sedan a few years past its heyday, an old person’s car—and he would not return until evening. (Once upon a time, I might have named the vehicle, but there had been so many over the course of the summer—too many to keep track of. I had stopped that game several states earlier, back before Chicken Man.) Tucker came home smelling of hard labor. He often had stains on his clothes: dirt or manure, I thought. I was unaccustomed to being apart from him. For months, my brother had been at my side, sharing every meal, filling every space with his voice, sleeping stretched out next to me, always close enough to touch.

  But things had changed. Tucker was acting secretive. He would not explain why we had come to California or where he went each morning. He would not reveal the significance of the green jumpsuit. He told me to wait. Something good was coming, he said.