California: A Novel

by Edan Lepucki

  A bird cawed above them.

  Frida couldn’t remember what she was supposed to do. Yell at it to go away, or step back quietly, or run like mad. This animal wasn’t huge, but it could hurt her.

  The coyote let out a rasping sound, its eyes arrowed into her, and Frida noticed an animal at its haunches. Something dead and small, a rabbit maybe.

  “I don’t want it,” Frida whispered. She already had a hand on her stomach; already she needed to keep her child away from this. She could feel the fear growing on her like a skin, a mold. She could smell it.

  The coyote pawed at its meat, rasped again. The dead thing had been torn down the middle and flattened like roadkill, limp and bloodied.

  The coyote turned back to her, and Frida read its body, saw that it would pounce if she didn’t get away. Above them the bird cawed once more.

  Frida turned and ran.

  On her way out of the forest, away, away, away, she grabbed every piece of clothing she saw, held them in her arms as if they could protect her.

  * * *

  “You look like a burglar,” Cal said as she approached the house with the wet bag of laundry on her back.

  “Help me with these,” she said. She was still shaking.

  “Sure thing.” Cal grabbed the coiled rope hanging from the side of the house, stretched it to the tree across the yard, and hooked it. He kept looking back at her as he did so, as if trying to figure out what was different about her, as if she’d just returned from the beauty parlor.

  “Are you all right?” he asked, when they were side by side at the line.

  “No,” she said.

  “Please don’t tell me you’re still pissed at me.”

  Frida shook her head. “It’s not that. Just now, after I finished the clothes, I went into the forest.”

  “You did what?”

  “We need to find other people. They’re nearby, I know it.”

  He didn’t answer.

  She squeezed his hand, hard. “Don’t lie to me.”

  “Why are you being so careless?” he asked.

  “Why are you being so duplicitous?”

  He smirked. “Good word.”

  “I’m pregnant, Cal.”

  “So now you’re sure about that.”

  “Would you rather I be sick?” She let go of his hand and pulled one of Sandy’s old dresses from the laundry bag. It was wrinkled and cold.

  He pulled it away from her. “Let me,” he said.

  “Just tell me what you know.”

  Cal closed his eyes, the dress in his hands. She could tell by the way his face scrunched up that she almost had him, that he’d do exactly what she asked. He wanted to tell her.

  He almost dropped the dress, but she grabbed it. “I just washed this,” she whispered. “Please don’t get it dirty.”

  “I should have told you as soon as Bo told me,” Cal said.

  “What do you mean?” Frida thought of the coyote and the animal it had killed.

  “Let’s go inside,” Cal said, and put a hand on her lower back.

  6

  They had packed two bags. Cal carried the larger camping backpack, and Frida had Bo’s rucksack. Rucksack: that was Bo’s word, and Frida said it made her think of a rugged country place, where men wore cowboy hats and called grown women gals. The rucksack was olive colored and dusty. After an hour, she said its straps bit into her shoulders, but she refused to let Cal carry it for her. She was trying to be tough.

  If Bo was right, it would take two days to get to the fabled Spikes. They had agreed to get as far as they could the first day and get moving again early the second day, so as to arrive at the Spikes with the threat of darkness still hours away. They had the extra-large sleeping bag, and more than enough food, and even the flashlight, which Cal tried to convince himself they would only use if they had to. He doubted they’d be so disciplined. They’d both grown a little spoiled since moving into the Miller Estate.

  Frida had been angry when he finally told her the truth. “How could you have withheld so much from me?” she’d yelled. But once they’d decided to go, she’d taken his hand and smiled, relief in her eyes. “We’ve got a plan,” she’d said. That wasn’t really true, though they did have a goal: they would present themselves to these strangers, these people who believed in containment. “And then what?” Cal wanted to know. Frida had no answer. Whatever happened, they would at least know who and what was beyond their land. She needed that, she said, and so did he.

  For the trip, Cal was wearing Garrett’s Official Pussy Inspector T-shirt. Frida had tossed it to him that morning when he was getting dressed. He’d laughed at first, and then, when he saw that she wasn’t kidding, shook his head, which meant, he supposed, I won’t wear a dead boy’s clothes.

  “If they ever spied on the Millers, they’ll recognize it,” she said. “At the very least they’ll laugh. Anyway, you have to. It’s your punishment.”

  She’d kept a straight face, but, later, when Cal shrugged the camping pack onto his back, Frida had barely managed to contain her laughter.

  “That stupid T-shirt,” she said. “Serves you right.”

  Before they left, he’d placed a hand on the front door and said a childish little prayer in his head, maybe to the house itself—Please keep us safe. We’ll be back soon. Should he put his palms together, he thought, kneel by a bed? No need. The words alone comforted him, or just one of them: Please. He wanted to return to their little plot of land as soon as possible. The problem was Frida hoped to stay away for as long as they could manage. It was why, he realized, he’d taken so long to tell her the truth.

  After his confession about the Spikes, they had spent two days discussing the inherent dangers of the trip. The difficult passage. “It won’t be easy,” Cal had said, feeling a sting of fear. “There might be rough bodies of water to cross and animals that come out at night. Who knows.”

  Frida had made up her mind. She told him it would be fine, that they just needed to get to the Spikes. Cal thought she was being naïve. “August must have had good reason to warn us to stay away,” he’d said. She argued he was being a wimp. No one would get hurt; Cal’s suggestion that she tie a pillow to her chest as a bulletproof vest was absurd, and she told him so.

  “The worst that’ll happen,” she said, “is that they’ll send us away.”

  Cal had said nothing as he tucked their pistol into the backpack.

  That morning three days ago, Frida had left a rag hanging over the solar torch by the door, a signal that she’d gone to do some chores. Laundry, probably. But so early? He’d been a little relieved she was gone, actually. He felt exhausted by her, all her anger and questions. And yet, when he’d first turned over in bed and found her side of the mattress empty, it scared him. As far as he was concerned, Frida was the only person left in the world. He wasn’t being poetic; it was a fact. And she might be carrying their child. She would become a mother. He couldn’t lose her.

  Cal had gone so far away from his own mom. That was the thought that rattled him until Frida returned. All he could think about was how distant he was from everything: from Ohio, from his dead parents, his boyhood. He wasn’t even thirty, and already everything from his past was unreachable, not just Cleveland, but Plank, too, and L.A. The California he used to know. Sometimes Frida was so busy missing her own family she forgot Cal had lost one, too. At least her parents were still alive somewhere.

  One of the last times he’d talked to his mother, she wanted him to come home for Christmas. “I’ll show you the new short I’ve been working on,” she said. Cal had been noncommittal, asked if she’d used actors, as planned, or something weird like Popsicle sticks. She was easy to distract if handed the right questions.

  It was his second year at Plank, and he hadn’t been back home since the day he’d left over a year before. He would have to fly, and the rising gas prices meant his father would have to sell his car to afford the ticket. More and more people were giving up driving al
together, and though Cal’s father would still have the diesel truck, he’d have no backup. It was too risky. Cal was afraid, too, that his return flight would be canceled (that had become common lately), and he’d be stranded in Ohio. He could not stand the thought of missing his last semester at Plank.

  When he talked to his mom again, it was really cold there. She said it was unrelenting, that ice was spiderwebbing across every window of the house, that there was so much snow she had a hard time opening the front door. She couldn’t afford to pay the heating bill, even with the money his dad had lent her. Cal’s parents had never been married, had never even been in love, and Cal’s mother didn’t like to lean on his father for a thing. Not that there was any more money to give her.

  Every time Cal tried to call after that, the line was dead. How many times had he tried? Not enough. Plank didn’t get the news right away. It wasn’t until some other kid’s parents learned about the storms, and thought to call the school in case any students had family in Ohio, that Cal knew for sure. The delay had almost been a blessing; he’d been spared the truth for as long as possible. Not that he hadn’t worried. The week before the news arrived, he hadn’t been able to get in touch with either of his parents, and he didn’t know if they were okay, if they were alive, if Cleveland even existed anymore.

  He should have asked to get off campus, to go online to find out, but he didn’t.

  When he learned that his mother was dead, he’d walked down the steps of the farmhouse, past all the boys with their books, past the cluster of Adirondack chairs that gave you splinters if you weren’t careful, past the rusted tractor and the sleeping sheepdogs, and into the fields, deeper and deeper. He fell down in the mud, and he stayed there until he was too cold to move. Micah had come to retrieve him. “Come on, friend,” he’d said, and pulled him off the ground. He wouldn’t let Cal go until they were inside.

  Cal’s mother had probably frozen to death in the house he had grown up in. Even now, he imagined her wrapped in the old green-and-white afghan, shivering in her big sleigh bed, in her big bedroom that had once belonged to her parents.

  He’d insisted on staying on at Plank. He went to class, he wrote his papers, and when the holidays came around he stayed on campus by himself. He celebrated New Year’s Day in the stable with the horses, and he never talked about what had happened until Frida arrived for commencement. It’d been easy to tell her.

  He’d forgotten how good it had felt, all those years ago, to spill his soul. She set him free, in a way, by listening.

  When she’d finally walked up the path of the house carrying that big bag of laundry, he knew he’d confess everything Bo had told him. He wouldn’t regret it, either, no matter where they were headed and what might befall them once they arrived.

  They were officially in unfamiliar territory now; they had passed the bathtub filled with stinking rainwater a while back. “There it is,” she’d called to Cal when its white porcelain side came into view, so smooth and stark against the trees.

  Cal reached down to pick up a sock.

  “What’s this doing here?” he asked.

  “I told you, I was doing laundry.”

  He waited; clearly, Frida hadn’t told him the whole story.

  “Just forget about it,” she said.

  “Where did you pee?”

  She pointed her toe at the spot. “Voilà!”

  Cal wanted to laugh, but he couldn’t help but picture his wife out here, all by herself. An animal could’ve come upon her. She could have been hurt.

  “If anyone tries to hurt you out there”—he swung his head in the direction they were headed—“I’ll shoot them.”

  “I know you will.”

  “Are you feeling okay?”

  “I’m great, why?”

  “I mean, do you feel different?”

  She paused, thinking. “I know everything will be fine, if that makes sense.” She grabbed her breasts. “And my boobs, they’re really sore.”

  “They are?” He put his hands on her chest. “They feel the same to me.”

  “I must be mistaken then,” she said. “What do I know?”

  “It was stupid to lie to you.”

  “We all have our secrets,” she said.

  They kept walking into the dense forest, where a few of the dogwoods were starting to change color. Frida allowed Cal to lead her, though he imagined she felt vaguely embarrassed to be following him blindly, as if he were her camp counselor. Bo had said only that the Spikes were due east, and already Cal and Frida’s way had been obstructed by fallen trees and a wide river neither of them could have imagined and that they had to wade across, and the sound of animals was close enough to make Cal stop and reach for his pistol, one arm across Frida as though they were in the car and he’d stopped short at a red light.

  They eventually rediscovered the tracks of August’s carriage. Cal had been certain that would happen. From then on, they traveled more easily along his path. Cal thought August probably took a variety of routes; this one wasn’t well trampled enough to have been used more than a couple of times.

  “You don’t trust August,” Frida said from behind him.

  “He doesn’t trust us,” he said. “Have you ever seen his eyes?”

  “No. Have you?” He heard her fake gasp. “Are they made of glass or something? Or robot parts?”

  Cal turned back for a moment. “Could be. I’ve never seen them either. That guy is always hiding something from us.”

  If they had still been new to the wilderness, the woods that surrounded them would strike him as identical to the ones they’d settled in. But Cal could see all the differences, however subtle: the space between trees, the light, the smells. It was incredible, to think this world had grown readable, as familiar to him as the street he’d grown up on. He couldn’t fathom how strange it would feel to come upon these Spikes. Would he be too afraid to continue?

  He began counting under his breath, One-two-three-four, again and again, a step for each number. He counted a little louder. These numbers would announce their presence.

  Sometimes, as a safety precaution to scare away animals, he sang while they hiked; his father had loved Sinatra, and Cal could do a passable rendition of “I Get a Kick Out of You.” Frida said she liked to imagine the bears swaying to his croon.

  But this counting, it was different than singing. Something about the repetition, the way he could break the distance into these manageable parts, bolstered him.

  He felt heat on his neck—a breath, a presence—and spun around. There was Frida, at his back, keeping close to him again.

  “Hi, darling,” she whispered, and like that, they kept walking.

  7

  Hours into their journey, Frida remembered something her mother had told her when she was a teenager. “I felt so confident when I was pregnant with you,” Hilda had said. “And then it happened again, with Micah.” She’d gone on to describe a peculiar peace that descended upon her with each pregnancy. As if, along with the necessary hormones and the double volume of blood swimming through her veins, a mother-to-be produced a reserve of courage for the life to come. Even naïveté could have a purpose. It was a survival skill, the same one that made a woman forget the pain of childbirth soon after it happened, so that she’d be willing to do it again someday. The species had to continue, didn’t it?

  Maybe Frida was feeling what Hilda had described. How else to explain how easily she pushed through these foreign woods, as if she would never be afraid again. She gave a secret nod to the coyote, hoped he’d eaten his kill and had taken a long nap after she’d run from him. Frida hadn’t told Cal about the coyote, and she wasn’t planning to. She deserved another secret from him. It evened the score.

  At dusk they tucked themselves into what must have been a campsite for August and his carriage. It was a clearing just big enough to set up a tent and let the mare rest, drink water from one of the many nearby streams, maybe eat a bucket of oats. Was that what mules a
te? Frida had wondered before where August had procured his animal, and if it slept in a stable somewhere, if it was offered a modicum of comfort and safety after each journey. Maybe Frida would finally find out.

  Cal made a small fire while Frida unpacked their bedding and pulled out provisions for dinner. At the bottom of her backpack, rolled in a sweatshirt, nestled the turkey baster. She’d nearly forgotten about it. Her contraband.

  She’d pulled it from the other artifacts after Cal had told her everything, and after she’d banished him from the house. She’d told him she needed to be alone to think, that he didn’t deserve to share a home with her. Once she was alone, the plan was already sprouting in her mind: they would go find these people, and she’d offer the baster as a gift. This was how disparate civilizations were supposed to interact, wasn’t it?

  She hadn’t told Cal about her idea. It was another secret she deserved.

  She still had trouble believing that, for months, Cal had known about the insidious Spikes, had known that August traded with the people beyond them. Since hearing Bo’s story, Cal must have conjectured about August. He might be from the Spikes himself, or he might be their leader. Cal must have reconsidered the Millers’ death, too: Had these strangers wanted their friends dead? And why?

  This is what hurt Frida the most: that her husband had bounced these ideas off the wall of his mind like the only child he was—alone, without anyone’s input. He’d played with that tennis ball by himself, and he’d scuffed the same place on the wall again and again without any progress or relief. He’d acted as if Frida weren’t there to help, or as if he wished she weren’t.

  They’d moved in together a few months after they began dating. It was a decrepit studio apartment in Hollywood, with a Murphy bed that came out of the wall. Their neighbors were either elderly or junkies, or both, always loitering out front or arguing with one another in the parking lot, and Frida and Cal would hole up in their place, lock the deadbolt, and tell each other about their lives.