Ruin Falls

by Jenny Milchman

  Liz found it hard to stop wrenching her hands on the wheel. She bent a fingernail back past the quick, and stared at the bead of blood that welled up.

  Jill had checked the house, so Liz wasn’t expecting to open the door and find Paul poring over journal articles in his study, the kids chasing each other around inside. But she still couldn’t imagine facing the emptiness there.

  It wasn’t as cool in Wedeskyull as she’d been expecting. The spongy, wet heat from Junction Bridge had seeped out, infiltrating even this mountain refuge.

  The turn into her drive came up suddenly, unexpected. Liz jerked the wheel, sliding across the seat. She braked to an abrupt halt, stumbling when she emerged from the car onto a half-moon of gravel in front of the porch. Her ankle bent sideways, and she had to sit down, rubbing it and trying to catch her breath.

  When hotter temperatures did come to the mountains, they tended to stay there, unable to escape. Liz felt trembly all over with the need to cool down.

  All around her were shouts—ghostly, yet real. A singsong of voices wrested back out of the past.

  Mom! I took an egg from under the mommy bird! It didn’t even break!

  Look what’s growing near the swing, Mommy! Alyssum!

  Liz stood up.

  The gardens beckoned, but no way could she go out to them now. Being amongst fronds and waving tendrils might keep her from ever moving again. The very vitality of the gardens would prove how dead she was. Liz could imagine lying down beneath their cool cover, digging herself an earthen grave.

  Instead she approached the tire swing, which hung motionless on its rope. The roots of the tree it was attached to were as thick as a man’s thighs.

  Over there was the crater in the lawn where Ally had tried to display her own garden to Paul, before Liz had begun to take her daughter’s calling seriously, and dug a separate plot. And there was the abandoned nest, one of whose eggs Reid had indeed addled, prompting Paul to come up with the rule that Reid could never pinch anything alive.

  Another possible trigger for Reid’s fear: when he found out the bird was dead in its shell.

  I killed it? he’d asked, weeping.

  The sound of their creek, a constant, white-noise rush, began to register.

  Reid spent so much time intricately damming that creek. He didn’t use his dexterous hands only to steal, he also built things. Suddenly Liz missed her son, with all his bumps and wounded spots, so white-hotly that she began to cry.

  Eyes veiled by tears, she climbed the porch steps, ankle twanging as she unlocked the front door. It creaked, the noise jarring in the utterly still house. They never went in this way, choosing to use the mudroom instead. Liz entered the hall amidst a shaft of sunlight and spinning dust motes.

  And then she broke into a run, ignoring her ankle as she took the stairs, flinging open the door to Reid’s bedroom.

  If anybody was unable to keep from disrupting a house—leave behind small giveaways of his presence—it would be Reid. A trail of objects he’d pilfered, scattered amongst the usual boy-mess of toys and sports equipment and discarded clothing.

  Liz peered in from the hall.

  The room was just as tidy as she’d left it. The bedclothes drawn flat, toys arranged on their chest. The spines of the books stood upright in a neat row. Even the closet door was shut.

  In Ally’s room, a bright cluster of VeggieTales sat on the floor, and only the gaping spot that belonged to Izzy revealed that somehow, entire worlds had changed.

  Liz couldn’t stay another second in this sad and haunted home.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Jill lived in a small house in town, which was why they’d had to base their business at Liz and Paul’s place in the valley. Liz drove in her best friend’s direction so unthinkingly and automatically that she was caught by surprise when she rolled up in front.

  Jill came out on the stoop, her arms extended, before Liz had even opened the car door. She got out and stepped into her friend’s embrace.

  “Coffee,” Jill said, as Liz cried against her. Then she murmured, “That was an asinine thing to say. But I can think of something a little better.” She turned and led Liz inside.

  Jill poured two glasses of whiskey as if she were serving iced tea. “Drink,” she commanded, gesturing to Liz before knocking a couple of fingers back herself.

  Liz obeyed. The whiskey heated her belly, and it struck her that the temperature outside wasn’t much cooler. It was as if something foreign and terrible had come to blanket the whole land. She scrubbed damp strands of hair back from her face.

  “I know,” Jill said, watching her. “Awful, isn’t it? It feels like we’re in the jungle instead of the woods. I don’t own a single fan, and they were all sold out in town.”

  Liz took another sip of her drink.

  “Am I really talking about the weather?” Jill asked. “Have I mentioned the word asinine?”

  “Jill,” Liz whispered. “It’s okay. You don’t have to—try so hard.”

  Jill’s eyes filled. “I want to try, Lizzie,” she said. “I want to do something to make this all right.”

  Their gazes met across the kitchen table. Then they both drank at the same time.

  It was Jill’s turn to whisper in the hushed room. “I can’t, can I?”

  Liz shook her head and Jill copied the move, though she didn’t seem aware of it.

  “I can’t,” Jill repeated. “I should know better than anyone that I can’t do a goddamned thing to make anything all right.”

  Liz looked away. A portable island was covered with rows of beribboned jars, Roots’ newest product line.

  “Those look good,” she said.

  Jill turned her own head and nodded. “Lia did a great job. That cloth is all hand-cut.”

  Lia was their intern, a student recommendation from Paul. Liz got up and lifted a jar of rhubarb compote. A piece of calico encircled its lid, tied off with a length of organza. The jar’s heft was pleasingly solid. These would do well at the weekend markets, and there were other possibilities, too. Restaurants, B&Bs.

  “Liz,” Jill said from behind. “I know this isn’t exactly comfortable territory for you, but can I ask what you’re going to do?”

  Liz walked back to the table. “What do you mean, not comfortable territory?”

  Jill stared at her blankly. “I didn’t think that was going to be the controversial part of the question.”

  Liz fisted her hands on her hips.

  “Come on, Lizzie. You’re great at putting the plants in, getting them to grow, but who came up with the financing, the client base? Who decided to open Roots as a business in the first place?”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  Jill dabbed off her forehead with a cloth. “I just mean that you’re not exactly the decisive one. The doer.”

  Liz grabbed her glass and took another drink, aware that she was trying to disguise the flush rising on her face.

  “Which is fine,” Jill continued. “Except that now you’ve got a family to put back together again. And this time, you can’t ask Paul.”

  No amount of alcohol could hide the stain now. The best friend she’d been hugging a few minutes ago suddenly seemed deserving of a slap. Liz would’ve delivered it—was stepping forward, feet a little loose from the whiskey—but then she realized she didn’t have an answer to the question.

  “I don’t know,” she said, turning around in the small space. She picked up a different jar. Pickled asparagus spears, and gingham instead of calico. “I have no idea what I’m going to do.”

  “Can I make a suggestion?” Jill asked, standing up also.

  Liz looked at her and nodded.

  “I know that nobody can understand a marriage from the outside. And it’s not like I have any experience in the area anyway.” Jill shrugged, then began to fan her underarms beneath the thin straps of her tank. “Man, is it hot.”

  “Yes?” Liz said, half-impatient, half-annoyed.

&
nbsp; Jill looked at her.

  “Marriage?” Liz prompted.

  Jill stopped fanning. “You just never seemed to—know Paul all that well to me. He called the shots, and you either went along with them, or did your best to hide that you weren’t going along with them.”

  Liz thought of the treats Reid lifted from other kids—how his sleight of hand might even be explained by all the things that were forbidden him and Ally—and what she herself kept hidden from Paul in the day-to-day. From sports the kids played that awarded meaningless, plastic trophies machined in China to the bottled water that was served at games.

  “And Paul was kind of there, coming down every now and again, but otherwise not really all that available. At least, that’s how it looked from where I sat.”

  Liz felt anger rise. From where Jill sat. They both knew where that was. “So?”

  Jill lifted her shoulders. “So maybe a good place to start is by getting to know him, really know who he was. I guess that’s what I’m saying.”

  Someone stepped into the room, and they both looked up.

  “Do you need something, hon?” Jill asked.

  Her son was a big, hulking boy, man-sized at not quite fourteen. He stared at Liz.

  “Do you remember Aunt Liz?”

  Liz had diapered this boy, and driven him to enough Cub Scout meetings, hockey practices, and church sermons on Sundays that he used to call her car the limo. Lizomine he’d said once as a preschooler, delighting both Jill and Liz, and the coinage had stuck.

  Andy shook his head back and forth. “Hello,” he said politely to Liz.

  “Hi, And.” Liz swallowed the nickname when he stared blankly. “Hello, Andy.”

  He walked over to the coffeepot.

  Jill stood up. “Not at night. Remember? It keeps you awake.”

  After a slow beat, Andy stepped back. He opened the refrigerator and took out a carton of milk, which he seemed to drain in a swallow. Until six months ago, he used to access Liz’s fridge in the same casual, unconsidered way.

  “Goodnight.” Andy turned and left the room, steps sounding deliberately outside.

  Jill and Liz’s replies echoed back.

  “No change?” Liz asked quietly.

  He had been injured during last year’s hockey season. The team wasn’t scrimmaging or even doing drills, just skating around after practice, when Andy tripped and went into the boards. Head injuries could be a freak thing. Jill—and Liz by trickle down—had learned enough about concussions by now that they could suggest changes to the NHL.

  Jill shook her head. “He’s still holding at seventy-five percent, which leaves holes. Newer stuff usually, but in Andy’s case it’s a mix.” She spoke with clipped heat. “It’s okay. We’ve got him on this new regime—massive doses of fish oil—and it really seems to be working.”

  Once Jill would’ve snorted over the idea of alternative medicine the way she laughed about mothers who wouldn’t let their kids watch TV on a playdate. But desperation drove you to new places. Liz understood that now.

  “Well, that’s good,” she said. Wondering darkly, as if tonguing a sore spot, who had it worse. Was it better to have your children in some unknown location, but presumably doing okay? Or some carved-out version of the child you’d raised?

  Jill nodded, three rapid times.

  Liz felt a surge of sorrow as she stood. “Andy looks good. Still growing like a weed.”

  Her best friend gave her a smile whose ingredients only Liz would have recognized. Love, and remembrance—for the days when his size was the one worrisome thing about Andy—and a bitter, jerking regret.

  “Yes,” Jill said. “He does keep doing that.”

  Liz hugged her before going out into the gathering dark.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  This time when she got out of the car, Liz approached the house from the side instead of the front. As she walked, her nose filled with a peaty scent, and she caught a glimpse of curling leaves.

  Something was overgrowing the fence. Liz walked over to take a look.

  The farm occupied two acres at the rear of the house, signaled by a painted sign hanging from a fence post. Roots.

  Before there was a business, this was just Liz’s solitary garden, penned to keep out the deer. Then Jill had begun to help. She proved to have not only a thumb green enough that the plot had quadrupled in size, but also a head for business. Soon the two of them were producing small but viable crops never before seen in the brutally brief Adirondack growing season. Poona Kheera cukes and micro-greens like mizuna and tatsoi, papery-skinned tomatillos and mulched asparagus as pale as vanilla ice cream.

  The pursuit had married well with Paul’s knowledge about resilient ways of planting, methods that weren’t dependent on commercial fertilizers, yet that extended the growing season to nearly year-round. Paul had consulted as two room-sized cold frames were built, and soon Liz and Jill had far more bounty than they were able to ply neighbors and parents and teachers with.

  They began turning their extra wares into pickles and jams and spreads, jarring them prettily, and before long they needed Lia to help with the overload.

  Liz unlatched the gate and stepped past the mesh fencing onto a winding path. She braced her hips with her hands and took a look around.

  It was the height of the season, and she and Jill had been spending four hours a day just staying on top of the weeds. In Liz’s absence they had proliferated; the crops would be impacted if this hogweed and loosestrife and bittersweet couldn’t be beaten back. Liz made a mental note to charge Lia with the task. Their intern didn’t come from a farming background as most of Eastern Ag’s students did. Lia was part of a new wave of farming hopefuls, young people for whom the pursuit was part avocation, part art. And as such, she wasn’t fully acculturated to the life; the constant, changing needs of its cycle; and its twenty-four/seven chokehold.

  Aware of hunger for the first time all day, Liz reached down and peeled a leaf of sweet cabbage from a closely clustered head. She chewed as she walked down the rows, making sure vines wound upward, snapping off any withered or overlarge stems from the varieties of kale.

  She brushed dirt from her hands. A pocked moon had risen in the sky.

  She was avoiding going inside. Jill’s words had left a harsh and bracing taste in the back of her throat, but they had also given Liz an idea.

  In the mudroom, she stepped out of her shoes.

  Then she climbed the stairs and went into her husband’s office.

  Paul was an academic and the spaces he occupied reflected the role. While Liz devoted most of her time to being outside, Paul spent the same stretches cooped up. That was why indoor spaces always felt cluttered; their occupants were trying to push against unnatural bounds. Outdoors there was an endless offering; here Paul had been constrained by a desk and shelves and some spillover onto the floor.

  Liz crouched down, fanning through piles of journals before reaching for some more. They gave off a meteor shower of dust and she sneezed. Journal of Independent Farming. Permaculture in the Larger Culture. Tracts on genetic modification—its potential risks—and lengthy exegeses about the misuse of corn in ruminants and fowl. There was a journal that focused solely on the process of making soy protein isolate.

  Nothing Liz wasn’t used to hearing about, so frequently that the words had turned into a vague background thrum. This had been the bread and butter—the sprouted wheat and flax oil—of Paul’s daily life.

  She made neat stacks out of the volumes she’d looked at, two or three towers, then rose and crossed to Paul’s desk. He hadn’t taken his laptop wherever he had gone. She flicked on the machine, removing a stack of books from the chair so that she could sit. The dark was growing oppressive, pressing in from the hall, and Liz turned on a lamp.

  She watched the computer boot up. It was an older machine; Paul spurned the latest upgrades as he did most forms of consumerism. He believed that the endless succession of new products was worse than a mere p
lay for money; he saw it as a way to acclimate people to a life of constant consumption.

  Over the churning of the hard drive, Liz heard some sort of rapping, and went out into the hallway to check.

  There were windows along the hall, but a tap on one of them wouldn’t have been audible from the study. Liz went downstairs, pulled open the front door, and stepped onto the porch in her stocking feet. The moon gave a silvery glow to her car, but there was no other vehicle visible. Nobody was around. The evening had finally cooled off; the lighter air was a relief.

  Liz went back inside, pulling the door shut behind her.

  She peered into the living and dining rooms, then checked the kitchen and mudroom just to make sure, but they were each empty. Liz did something then that she couldn’t recall doing in all the years she had lived and gardened and raised children here. She turned the lock on the mudroom door. It swiveled slowly, unused to movement, before settling into place with a decided clack. Liz went back to the hall and latched the front door as well.

  She walked upstairs, feet padding. At the top, she turned and looked down, leveling her shoulders. She’d never been scared in her own home, scared anywhere really. But fear was a constant companion now, and the house’s grasp around her suddenly felt suffocating. Liz couldn’t escape the dread awareness of whatever might be happening to Reid and Ally, and even that was just a blind for the worst fear of all: that she would never see her children again.

  Paul’s machine had booted. She used the mouse to start surfing the web, clicking the History button as soon as it appeared. The column that came up was blank.

  Liz closed the browser and tried again, frowning, but the same thing resulted.

  Had Paul scrubbed his search history? She checked—all of his emails had been deleted. Fully deleted, not just sent to Trash.

  Paul had flipped the interior security lock, failed to fool the police, and allowed himself and his companion to be seen by the bellhop. But in this sector at least—as with his cell phone—he’d evinced some shrewdness.