The man climbs down the ladder and trots over to the car, leaning an arm against the roof. He’s little more than a kid, hair sticking out from beneath his EKK baseball cap, half-obscuring his eyes.
“This was the last house in Dolores Woods that didn’t have a system. Folks had a break-in last week. We have total coverage here now.”
“Total coverage. What’s that mean?”
“We have a contract on every house in this neighborhood. Dolores Woods is an EKK SafeZone.”
ON SATURDAYS SHE HAS NO responsibilities at the house. The day nurse will be there to help Julia attend to her father, Chilton, who shouts and cries, protesting when it’s time for him to eat, to drink, to have a bath or go to the toilet. Every action other than sitting on the couch watching television or playing with his camera, taking pictures of Julia or Louise, of the new cleaning woman or the day nurse, is met with protest. The man is not interested in his survival or existence, only in watching. In fact, it is no longer clear to what extent he is aware of his body having needs: for food, for sleep, for excretion. There is more than one toddler in the house.
Stepping into the hallway she calls out, “I’m back!” She does not and will never say that she “is home,” because as much as the house is the place where she now lives, she does not think of it as home. Home is where the turning lane and boulevard now bask. Home is covered in concrete and parkway and ornamental plantings. What remains of home lies in the old steamer trunk where Donald used to keep his sweaters, the inside of which retains a trace of his scent. Each year she opens it on his birthday and inhales briefly before closing it again for another twelve months.
There is no reply and Louise goes upstairs to find her employer and her charge, this thin old man who is beyond teaching, sitting in the room that used to be Nathaniel’s study. After the murders, Julia told Louise she could stay for as long as she wished, guaranteeing employment of one kind or another until the day when she was ready to retire. “And after that, who knows,” Julia said. “But from my perspective I don’t see any reason why you should ever leave unless you want to.”
“I don’t want to take advantage,” Louise said.
“No, you couldn’t. You help me remember.”
Chilton smiles when he sees Louise. He always smiles, for a reason none of them can tell since he no longer speaks in ways that make sense. The day nurses he dislikes, the cleaning woman he loathes, and, apart from Louise, only Julia gets a smile from her father. The camera is in his hands, and as Louise enters the room, he raises it and takes her picture. They have given up telling him it is rude to photograph people without asking permission since he never remembers the rule. In any case, the memory cards, which Julia puts aside once they are full, are not destined for wider circulation. Chilton looks at the pictures he has taken, but only for as long as he can remember having taken them. The balance of images sits in a box, and on one of Julia’s computers, waiting for future analysis, for meaning to be drawn from so much abstract quotidian detail.
“How are you, Chilton?” Louise asks. The man smiles and Julia pats his shoulder.
“He ate a big lunch for a change,” Julia says. “We walked up to the lot this morning. I think maybe a morning walk is better.”
“Where’s Sandy?”
“He’s taking a nap.”
This is their routine, the tenor of most of their engagements: talking about Chilton, about better ways to manage him, to make him more comfortable, to increase his appetite, and speaking of Sandy, the rough little being with long limbs and black-blond hair who now sleeps in the room that once belonged to his brother. They do not talk about the past. They do not talk about Nathaniel or Paul Krovik. Above all, they do not talk about Copley. The names of the dead are never spoken. It is the dead who must speak.
LOUISE GOES DOWN TO THE basement, passing Julia’s workshop. The machine mounted on the counter wakes up as her movement activates its motion sensor. It has the face of a child but the skin is a hard, translucent white material, and the features cartoonish, except for the eyes, which are wet and mobile, blinking and staring.
“Can I help you?” it asks. Julia keeps saying she’s going to put in a different recording but it still speaks in Copley’s voice and the sound, so natural, makes Louise jump. She knows that the voice will remain because it is all that is left of Copley. Most nights, Julia retreats to the basement, locking the door behind her, spending hours talking to this simulacrum of her dead son under the guise of research: a machine has become her best and most intimate companion, the only solace and consolation she has.
“How can I help you?” the machine asks, turning its head to watch as Louise passes beyond its view into the pantry.
“What’s the outside temperature?” she calls back.
“It’s forty-two degrees Fahrenheit, with a wind from the northwest at five miles per hour,” the machine says. A prototype for a home-assistance unit, it is always and ever ready to help, to answer whatever questions it may.
The back wall of the pantry has been removed and the bank vault door to the fallout shelter is now always left open. When the police gave them leave to return to the house, Julia had the shelter emptied and redecorated, the red walls with outlines of half a dozen imaginary doors all obscured with heavy coats of white paint. There was a mess of boards and beams and broken glass right at the entrance, nailed together in a strange confusion, a madman’s puzzle, surrounded by dirt and branches, leaves and rocks. Beyond the rubbish were the half-butchered carcasses of at least eight deer, rank and rotten, crawling with maggots, a stink Louise had never known in a lifetime on the farm. It took a month for professionals to clean it out, strip it, put it back together. She wonders now what to call it: a big basement with heavy doors, a hidden exit, a backup plan, a place to shelter in tornado season or the end of the world, which might be the same thing these days. The three rooms and the bathroom remain, the cupboards filled with a new stock of dried and canned goods. At the far end, Louise opens the lock on the rear containment door and steps into the old stone storm cellar, which is dark until she unlocks the wooden doors at the top of the stairs and pushes them open.
The woods are quiet, branches bare, and the sun is already going down. There’s been no snow yet, not even a hard frost. Locking the doors behind her she presses into the trees, ignoring the paths, until she finds herself in front of the ruined stone chimney, more than a third of it in rubble among the leaves, a bare vine twining up through what remains, in and out of the stones, bringing the structure down by degrees.
Leading herself through half-darkness, she makes her way to the tree where it happened. The first branch, thirty feet or more off the ground, is connected to the trunk at a slight angle. She can see Paul sitting there, waiting for deer, watching the entrance to the storm cellar. And just as easily she can see the version Paul related at the trial: a father and son engaged in some strange struggle of rope and power, the child tied fast, the father, out of shape, pulling the boy’s struggling body up to the branch, the way even a slight surprise, never mind the blast of a gun, would have been enough to make the overstressed father lose his unsteady grip, letting his son fly back into space and come to rest on the rock at the base of the tree, a rock that, even in this twilight, is marked by a stain. Although the autopsy was inconclusive she can also see Paul ambushing the father and son, tying up the child, beating him to death, and drowning the father. She can see it without any difficulty.
From the first day she met Nathaniel she recognized him as a man out of his proper territory, in a place where he did not belong or know how to behave. And he had a son who was also out of his territory, in a place where he did not belong. When you put a person in a place that is not natural to their being, there’s no telling what they may do to try to fit in, to find a way of surviving. Louise knows Krovik’s version of that day is possible, and knows as well that Julia will never accept it could be true. In the en
d, Krovik, who was poorly represented, was convicted of both crimes: the murder of the father and of the son. Louise suspects there might have been another crime as well, for which Krovik was never charged. Studying the new child each day, the boy who looks nothing like Nathaniel, with his long narrow nose, blank arctic blue eyes, and lion-fierce movements, Louise has little doubt that the man must be guilty. And the women brought forth giants. Everything has come asunder.
AT HIS REQUEST, SHE GOES back to see Paul one last time. Julia does not know about these visits and Louise sees no reason to tell her.
Either EKK security is getting lax, or their reliance on technology has increased, but this time she and Paul are left alone in the same interview room, no guard to watch over them. How long would it take for someone to reach them if Paul made a sudden move, wrapped his broad hands around her throat, pulled a shank from his sock and tried to stab her in the gut? But no, there could be no shank. She remembers he would have been strip-searched, that there is no chance of him carrying any weapon or contraband on his person, unless the prison guards are corruptible.
“Hi friend,” he says, sitting down across from her and encircling her chair with his legs.
“Hello Paul.”
“We’re still not friends?”
“No, I don’t think we can be friends.”
“No, I guess not,” he says, sounding disappointed, in the same tone she once heard from so many boys just like Paul, resigning themselves to circumstances they had created but not chosen.
“Has anyone else come to see you?”
“My mom is all. She comes most days.”
“And your dad?”
“Once a week usually. I keep hoping my wife will come, or at least that she’ll call. I’ve tried to call her parents, but they changed their number a long time ago. So I don’t know where that leaves me. Or, I guess I do know where that leaves me. With you, and with my parents. And with the people who are looking forward to seeing me fry.”
“Except you’re not going to fry.”
“You know what I mean. Some of the other guys say that’s what it’s like, if they get the mix wrong. Like your veins light on fire and burn until you pass out. And then—”
“And then?”
“I used to believe in something but I don’t anymore. I don’t believe I’m going anywhere. I just think everything stops, and maybe for a second I’ll be alone, like outside the walls of this place, outside of the city, standing in a field, digging my bare feet into the ground, and then a fire rises up around me before it all goes dark.”
“Will you say anything before they do it?”
“Nah. I apologized at the trial for what happened. I had nothing against Nathaniel as a man, you know. He was just trying to do his best. I don’t have anything else to say. I didn’t kill the kid. And I’m not going to apologize for something I didn’t do.”
She opens her mouth to suggest it might be the generous thing to do, the kind of gesture that would give someone else a sense of solace. “It would be altruistic.”
“Yeah, I know that word. I know you think what you’re doing is altruistic, coming out here and talking to me and watching me die. But it’s not. It’s . . . self-interested. You’re trying to clear your own conscience.”
“My conscience is clear, Paul. I never did anything to you. And you have nothing to lose from saying a few good words.”
“I have nothing to gain, either. The governor won’t be in the room.”
“The governor might not be in the room, but she might be watching.”
He looks at Louise and then up at the cameras in the ceiling, arches an eyebrow, shrugs. “Maybe, maybe not. I bet she has better things to do than watch me.”
A long low animal sigh unknots itself from his mouth and he runs a hand through the stiff bristles on his head. She cannot imagine what is in his mind. No one else she knows has ever faced a scheduled end to life, recorded and announced, with the prospect of crowds outside, screaming jubilation at a death, while a smaller crowd pleads mercy, standing vigil with candles. Perhaps he really does want a friend; she knows he could use one. At this stage, a friend is about the only succor he’s going to get, short of his ex-wife deciding, by some miracle of reconciliation, that she will allow him to see his sons before it is too late, before he is asked to strip to his underwear and is escorted into the room where curtains will be opened to a viewing gallery after he has been strapped to the table, his limbs secured with lengths of cushioned leather, the needle inserted into his vein, an opportunity afforded for him to make that final statement of repentance.
“What would you have me do here, Paul?” she asks. “I want to do something for you.”
“You mean now?”
“There is no other time. This is the end of your time. This is the last time I will see you and the last time you will lay eyes on me. You notice I don’t assume that you will see me, only that your eyes will rest on my body. I don’t think you’ve ever really seen me, not in the way that I have seen you.”
The cockiness drains out, smoothed away, the smirks and quirks and eye-rolling stares exit left and right, all of them gone, until there is just the hardened dark face of a boy with lime-blue aquamarine eyes and the heaviness of loss about him, pulling him down now that the mask can no longer do the looking for him, propping him up in performance.
“No, I see you. I can see now,” he says, folding his hands on the table. “That’s enough. You don’t have to do anything else. Just sit there. Just look at me.”
AT TEN TO MIDNIGHT, LOUISE tells Julia she is going out for the walk she has been planning since dawn, knowing she wants to be nowhere else but on the open fields of what was once her farm when one day turns over to the next, and another life, the fire and horror of that specific life, goes out of the world.
Although it is December the air is cool but not yet cold, the sky clear, the familiar winter constellations appearing where she expects them to be. The pavements are dry, the floodwaters of three years ago receding even as the unfinished houses remain in their hazardous state, eye-socket cavities rotting and dark, all the empty land untouched, weed-wild, pocked with utilities points and streetlights, waiting for houses that may never come. The grass is long and brown, wildflowers dried out rather than frozen and disintegrating into nourishing muck, everything tinder dry and aching, splitting, the soil seething with roots. Still good land, rich land, acres that could produce again, but it needs renewal, a new start. Taking the head of a tall prairie stalk in her fingers she scatters seeds on the wind, laughing at herself as if an invisible companion has seen through her intentions. Yes, all the time, every day, the fingers itch, the impulse flutters along the nerves, the hand reaches for what it should not touch, for what hangs in the pocket tonight, rattling light.
When she is out of sight of the houses, down an incline, past one of the old gullies where the cottonwoods still grow, a confusion of limbs in the moonlight, angling tree-beasts, she stops and finds a sheltered place in the open fields where the dead grass lies in bundles gathered together by the passage of wind and the movement of deer. According to her watch the first injection will occur in thirty seconds, the death following shortly thereafter. From the pocket of her coat she takes out the box, slides it open, removes two sticks, slides the box closed, and snaps the sulfurous heads against the friction panel on one side. Two yellow darts appear and merge as she drops the box back into her coat, cupping her hand round the flame, leaning close to the earth and waiting as the fire catches, draws oxygen to its heat, and takes hold.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For assistance and advice of various kinds, thanks to Michael Holtmann, Deborah Seddon, Aimée Stoffel, Skyler Dalley, Dr. Claudia M. Toth, Sonja Amber Kuchma Hosler, Ana María Sánchez-Arce, Paul Tick, Jim Owens, Katy Breuer, Fernando Melendez, Clemens Mackay of Solstice Hill Farm, Carolyn and Frederick Wellington, and the staff and inmates of
the Nebraska State Penitentiary.
Profound thanks to everyone at Atlantic Books, but most especially to Margaret Stead, Ravi Mirchandani, Karen Duffy, Toby Mundy, James Roxburgh, and Tamsin Shelton, as well as to Sarah McGrath at Riverhead Books.
For their tireless efforts on my behalf, thanks to the incomparable Victoria Hobbs, Jennifer Custer, and George Lucas.
For being nothing like my characters, thanks to my parents.
For wisdom, patience, and love, thanks most of all to Andrew van der Vlies.
Fallen Land Page 39
