We Went to the Woods

by Caite Dolan-Leach

  “So you think she accidentally lit herself on fire?” Louisa bristled.

  I was surprised to see this demonstration of her attachment. Or perhaps I had flattered myself; I’d thought she took a shine to only a select few. That I was special. If she had so easily fallen for Zelda, what did that say about me? I felt selfish for thinking about it.

  “Look, she hasn’t been herself,” Kayla explained. Louisa was glowering dangerously, and I could see the curve of Chloe’s neck as she moved her entire self towards Louisa, to comfort. Jack looked unsure where to put his empathy and adopted a hangdog expression to communicate his general forlornness. I couldn’t read Beau.

  “I want to see her,” Louisa announced. “I want to talk to the sister.”

  “I don’t think you do,” Kayla said. “She’s a fucking piece of work.”

  “Give me her phone number. I need to speak with her.”

  “I don’t know it! That bitch has been incommunicado for two years,” Kayla said. “She lives in France. Zelda only talked about her when she got really drunk. Which I guess was kind of often,” she admitted with a shrug.

  Louisa strode off abruptly; it seemed like she might be crying.

  “She’s not used to feeling powerless,” Chloe said, observing Louisa’s posture, the squaring of her shoulders.

  “We’re all powerless,” Jack said, with a note of bitterness. “Louisa has just been insulated from it her whole life by illusions of control. No thanks to her parents.” His biting tone surprised me; Jack could be a sharp analyst, capable of summing a person up in a short, cold phrase, but only rarely would he be truly nasty. But he would counterbalance these moments of crotchetiness with pure, youthful joy: at a new idea, a sprouting scallion, a pregnant goat. I suspected he would be at his best when he was seventy: a fine wine, ripened to its proper age.

  Seeing Louisa put the phone back in her pocket, Chloe went to her side, and I felt that eternal pang of exclusion, watching how they turned to each other. Louisa seemed so calmed by Chloe’s presence at her side, even though her agitation at the phone call she had just ended was still visible. I envied Chloe’s unerring ease, her infallible intuition for how to approach the skittish racehorse, as well as Louisa’s willingness to turn to her, let Chloe comfort her. I knew I was capable of neither.

  Jack decided to trail after the girls, and Beau wandered off to his cabin. But Kayla remained next to the picnic table, one foot scuffing the dust, alone as we all walked away.

  * * *

  —

  I was shocked at the extent of Louisa’s rage and sadness—it felt as though she were grieving, but as far as I knew, she had met Zelda only a few times, so her attachment seemed weirdly intense. I wondered if they’d known each other in different contexts, or if they had somehow spent more time together than I had been aware of. Louisa was too cranky for me to risk bringing this up with her, and Chloe appeared to know no more than I did.

  We read Zelda’s obituary—a rather bizarre one—in the newspaper, and when a Facebook event was created for her memorial service, Louisa insisted we all go. Jack and I balked; we both felt awkward, as though our presence would be not only unappreciated but somehow even gauche.

  The truth is, though, that I felt Beau hovering, and I fantasized that perhaps, for the first time, he might in some way be within my grasp. With Louisa alternately fuming and moribund, Chloe was occupied with comforting her, making sure she didn’t fly off the handle. This left Beau unoccupied. The morning of the memorial service, I caught myself giving him wry winks and the odd knowing glance with a sauciness that might have come off as manufactured, if I hadn’t felt so newly and strangely confident. And it seemed to me that only Beau could see the change.

  We weren’t the first to arrive at Silenus, Zelda’s family vineyard; the parking lot was already modestly filled with other battered pickups and a handful of tired Volvos. I quailed at the thought of arriving late; I had attended only two funerals—for each of my mother’s parents—and both had been rather formal affairs, with visiting hours at a funeral home and a full liturgy at the church. Both had been remarkably dull. I had a feeling this one wouldn’t be.

  Kayla, who had hitched a ride with us, immediately hopped out of the truck and raced for the door of the tasting room, leaving us behind. We dawdled by the vehicle while Beau smoked a cigarillo, this the only indication that he felt on edge. His little cigars were props that masked any discomfort with an anachronistic puff of smoke. I wondered if Louisa and Chloe knew this about him, had observed him closely enough to notice the way he hooded his eyes when he lit the cigar tip, buying himself a moment of inscrutable contemplation of his shoes while he collected himself. I wanted to know if Louisa and Chloe had cataloged the different ways his eyes could squint: in mirth, in irritation, in an attempt at secrecy. I wanted these observations to be mine alone.

  We wandered in three or four minutes after Kayla, and I was surprised by the scene. There were no elaborate bouquets of white hothouse flowers, no priest solemnly comforting each arrival, no cluster of hunched mourners who clearly belonged to the deceased. Instead, the tasting room at Silenus looked rather like a party, with wineglasses being handed around and a general social milling about. The view was spectacular; I had been driven up Route 414 along Seneca Lake a few times, but the vista still took my breath, even though it resembled the west shore of my own Cayuga Lake. The sprawl of the vineyards made it look like a different part of the world, the way I imagined maybe Lake Como, or some fantastically remote New Zealand panorama. I stood by the window to gawk and eavesdrop; I wanted a good view of the action, when it arrived. Jack brought me a glass of chardonnay, which he held up to the light appreciatively.

  “It’s a reserve, apparently,” he said happily, and I couldn’t help smiling. Jack loved to eat and drink, and he was an enthusiastic taster of anything put before him. But he had a more or less undiscerning palate—he enjoyed most wines with equal gusto. I’d noticed he liked to store up knowledge, and, for him, learning about the local wines was much like reading about different tomato irrigation methods. Information to be stored, then deployed at a later date. I sipped. Even my underdeveloped palate balked. Jack swished it around his glass and squinted knowledgeably.

  “Not as oaky as I would expect,” he concluded before sloshing at least a third of the glass into his mouth for a second try.

  “Sure,” I said. I was desperately curious to see Zelda’s twin sister, whom I thought should be obvious but who seemed, bizarrely, not to be in attendance. I sidled along the balcony, looking out at the twinkly water and the plunge of grapes down to the shore. After a moment’s contemplation of the view, I felt somebody at my side, and then saw Chloe’s hand appear, bearing some sort of cracker.

  “You should eat this,” she said, holding out her gift. “Someone brought some really tasty Brie.” I smiled, and let her pop it into my mouth. As I chewed, some crumbs tumbled from my lips.

  “Good,” I managed. “I like it.”

  “This is a really weird party,” she said, shaking her head. She was wearing her hair up today, and the golden fuzz on the back of her neck caught the sunlight. Why didn’t my skin look like that?

  “Do you think Fennel and co will come?” I asked.

  “I doubt it. Fennel wouldn’t bother with the social graces.”

  “I suppose not.” A frail woman in a wheelchair had just trundled out onto the balcony. In one hand, she clutched a full glass of white wine, which sloshed dangerously with each awkward maneuver. We were standing closest to her, and Chloe instinctively lurched to help her. Of course, Chloe never actually lurched; in a single movement, she curved her body towards the older woman, and in the graceful, clean way she always moved, she steadied the wheelchair and the woman’s rickety arm. I saw Jack preparing to make the same adjustment, but instead he knocked his own wineglass onto a bystander’s plate, and was forced to turn and
deal with the damage.

  “Did you want to get closer to the view?” Chloe asked, preparing to take the woman’s glass to set on the edge of the balcony. The woman stubbornly hung on to it.

  “Ha. I’ve seen enough of this view for three lifetimes. If this is the last time I have to stare at it, it will be enough.” She snorted and took a serious slurp from her glass, her eyes going almost blank. “You two knew ‘the deceased,’ then?” she asked, turning back to us with a sharpness that surprised me.

  “Not well,” I said. “But we were acquaintances.”

  “Zelda had a hard time holding down real friends,” the woman said with a cruel smile. “Still, nice to see a full house of gawkers.” She drained the rest of her wine. Chloe glanced at me. The woman regarded her empty glass despairingly, and began the ungainly process of turning her chair around. “Should’ve stayed near the bar,” she mumbled.

  “Can I—can I get you a refill?” Chloe asked.

  “That would be lovely,” the woman said, handing off the glass. Chloe raised her eyebrows at me and disappeared inside. I stood, shrugging against the scratchiness of my shirt, trying to think of something to say.

  “Pretty day,” I attempted. Around the Finger Lakes, everyone is always happy to discuss the weather.

  The woman said nothing. She looked down at her idle hand, which was trembling. When she noticed me looking, too, she met my eyes.

  “A pretty day for a death?” she asked.

  “That’s not— I mean, I didn’t mean—”

  She waved away my stammering.

  “You don’t need to take me seriously. No one else does. What’s your name, little thing?”

  “Mack,” I said, extending a hand. She reached out her shaky claw for my own. Her skin was soft; her hands seemed even older than she was.

  “Mack,” she repeated, looking at my face. “Not…Mackenzie?” Did she know my parents? I wondered. Remember me from childhood, maybe? “You’re the one from that silly TV show? Who fucked up so badly?”

  Her recognition caught me off guard—I suppose I had grown numb from living off-grid, in my little bubble. I saw with alarm that Chloe was standing behind her, a bottle tucked into the crook of her arm and two glasses in hand.

  “I—it was a long time ago,” I stuttered. “It was just on the air for a little while.”

  “Ha! I loved that show. The Millennial Experiment. Perfect. I watched it with my daughter.” She waved a hand behind her head. “She thought it was hilarious. All you kids in Brooklyn, monkeying around. Great show. And then of course with you, and all that drama—excellent television! My God, Zelda would be so pleased that you’re here. Mind you, she was generally not fully conscious when we watched your show, so who knows.”

  I looked up at Chloe, whose eyebrows were at her hairline.

  “Wine for you, dear,” she said, stooping down to hand over one of the glasses she had now filled.

  “And aren’t you a peach,” the woman said. In the background, I could hear the sound of someone cuing up music, and I became aware of people congregating in the center of the room. We all turned to look. “I guess I’d better get back to my daughter’s funeral. It wouldn’t look good if I missed it. Hand me that bottle, would you, sweetheart? Or else my other ridiculous daughter will ration me half a glass every hour. Be a doll.”

  Chloe paused, then handed over the bottle. Emptying her glass, the woman put it in her lap and wheeled much more nimbly inside. I looked over at Chloe.

  “I suppose you caught that,” I said, pursing my lips.

  “I did, though, I’m not sure—look, if you don’t want to talk about it…”

  I sighed. “I don’t. But there’s no point pretending it didn’t happen anymore. The Internet is a horribly permanent thing.”

  Chloe reached out her hand and encircled my wrist with her two fingers. “You don’t have to.”

  “Look, I really regret all of it,” I began. “I never should have agreed to the show in the first place. But I thought it would help my research. My dissertation work was on ‘closed communities.’ I’d originally thought I’d do fieldwork on prison culture, and then I was talking with my supervisor and we started discussing reality TV. As a joke, at first. Only after a while, it occurred to me that no one had really written much on the culture within these shows, like Survivor or The Bachelor or whatever. I got fascinated, and when I heard about this thing that was casting in Brooklyn, where I was living, I kind of couldn’t resist.”

  “You were going to write about it?” Chloe asked, her blue eyes so open.

  “Yes. Maybe. I knew methodologically it probably wouldn’t fly, and my supervisor was pretty leery, but I just…I’d gotten so curious, you know? I figured it would be a jumping-off point. Maybe I could write an article about it, maybe it could be a chapter of my dissertation. Anyway. The show was called The Millennial Experiment, and it was a bunch of twenty-somethings who would have to live in this warehouse in Brooklyn and start up an urban farm and business. The challenges were like, who could make the best bathtub mozzarella or who could bottle the most kombucha and sell it to the local market. It was a bit self-mocking, you know, a bunch of hipsters doing the most hipster thing they could think of. But you could tell everyone was kind of into it, you know? And we all had to live in this weird, open-plan warehouse and everyone was sleeping together, of course. It was like a polyamory dating competition with homemade beer.”

  “I have no idea what that would be like,” Chloe said with a huge smile, and I laughed.

  “Yes, the irony isn’t lost on me. Anyway, it was all drama and selling the roof-grown gladiolas at the farmers’ market for the first couple of weeks. But eliminations started and people got weird and catty and it started to be a lot less…collaborative.

  “There was one person who I just hadn’t gotten along with from the beginning. We’d had this little competitive thing going, and it started to get a bit mean. Anyway, she was trans, but she wasn’t out and uh…well, I got drunk on moonshine one night and during an interview, I outed her on camera, to the producers. I mean, they knew, of course, and I later found out she’d asked to not have it be part of the show until she could talk about it on her terms.” I coughed to cover my discomfort. I’d spent months trying to repress what I’d said and done, desperate that my chance to start over would somehow undo this moment of colossal carelessness. “But I talked about it, at length, in my interview. I stayed on the show for a couple more weeks because no one really knew what I’d done, but of course the show aired, and the producers just…they played up that betrayal so that it was basically the central part of the show. Sara found out when the episode aired and…I mean, it was a social media shitshow. Experiment wasn’t even all that popular—it aired on some off-brand channel. People tweeted just…awful things. But, of course, what I’d done was fucking horrible. I’d told someone else’s story, without permission, on television. It was brutal, but…I kind of deserved it.”

  “You made a mistake, Mack,” Chloe said, pulling me closer. “You don’t deserve to be publicly pilloried for it.”

  “Well, I was. I got my own Twitter hashtag. #terfymackenzie. And when everyone found out where I was a grad student, my department got pressure to kick me out of the program. Which they did, of course. Even though I was probably going to drop out on my own. I had no desire to keep going with my research after all that.”

  “You kind of have, though, right?” Chloe asked.

  “Not on TV,” I said with a snort. “I guess my intellectual interests remain intact, but I…really, really like that we live off-grid.”

  “I would’ve thought you’d never try living with a group of people again.”

  “I didn’t think so, either. But I met you guys, and then, I don’t know, after that day at the waterfall…this just felt so real. That—the show—I mean, it was just that. A show, a performa
nce. This”—I clutched her fingers—“we’re—”

  “I’m glad you didn’t give up,” she said. “And I’m really glad you deleted your Twitter account.”

  * * *

  Beau brought us to the first protest a few weeks later. He’d been attending demonstrations with Fennel and her friends, and Louisa had been pushing for an invitation since the very beginning.

  “I realize it’s a public protest, but I’m not going to just pitch up and stand around by myself. I want to go with you, I want to meet all the different groups and their respective spokespeople,” she had said, verging on a whine.

  “It’s not like there are ‘spokespeople,’ Lou,” Beau explained. “It’s a protest. We’re all just civilians demonstrating.”

  “I get that. But there’s always an element of social organizing, and I want to understand that. Besides, I don’t even know which interest groups are there.”

  “ ‘Interest groups’ sounds a little sinister,” Jack pointed out.

  “Whatever. I know there are different concerns. There are the people who care about natural gas storage, and the ones who care about fracking, and the ones who care about windmills—maybe your friend Fennel could talk me through it someday,” she said.

  “She would be your friend too,” Beau said. “If you’d let her.”

  “Would she?” Louisa said in an arch tone. “We both know how Fennel feels about that, remember? I know exactly where her loyalties lie.”

  Beau wisely remained silent.

  Jack went to a demonstration with Beau before we did—Jack rarely felt uncomfortable in social situations that would make most people squirm, and he apparently didn’t share Louisa’s compunction about securing proper introductions; he moved through crowds of strangers with easy joy. When he came back, he reported to us that it was “very chill” and we should all go together for the next one.

  So, one week in July, we all piled into my pickup and headed towards Watkins Glen. The demonstration was to take place just out of town, at Lakeview, a company that was involved in—fracking? natural gas extraction? I was a little patchy on what, exactly, the precise purpose of the protest was, but in general I was comfortable protesting any corporate power.