With the wind racing around her and the engine roaring beneath her, the sound of it living inside her body, she was only herself. All the shackles that held her, all the things that frightened and pained her, fell away. She could think; her own voice was clear and true. All the other sounds went quiet and she was free.
* * *
She found a safe spot for her bike in the parking lot of Sacred Heart College, bringing it to a stop as far from the psychology building as possible, in front of a tall, shading tree that was raining leaves in a shower of gold and red. Students and faculty usually parked their vehicles close to the low glass-and-concrete building, one of the newer structures at the college. But Finley tried to leave the roadster far from other cars when she could, afraid that it would get dinged or knocked over. The glittering purple of the gas tank and the fenders seemed to invite damage; she’d already been keyed. There was something about a motorcycle that drew attention, not all of it good. Except on the road, where other drivers often seemed not to see her at all.
Shouldering her backpack, she slipped her phone from her pocket and checked the time. Forty minutes until the exam, more than enough time to get an espresso from the commissary and go over her notes in the classroom.
“I’m ready,” she whispered to herself. “I’ve got this.”
As she drew nearer to the building, she saw two girls she recognized from her abnormal psychology class. They were walking arm-in-arm, laughing at something they were viewing on a smart phone. She lifted a hand in a timid wave, but they didn’t see her, never glancing up from the screen. Lowering her arm awkwardly, she thought with a sting that she hadn’t made any friends in The Hollows, and she probably never would, freak that she was. Meanwhile, her few friends in Seattle were drifting further and further away, and maybe they’d never been real friends in the first place. Maybe they’d just been people with whom it was easy to get into
trouble. And once you weren’t looking for trouble, suddenly you weren’t fun anymore. Her sour mood deepened.
When the noise came back it was so loud that it actually startled her, stopping her in her tracks.
SQUEAK-CLINK.
Her heart fluttering, she glanced around at the idyllic college campus in autumn, a near-perfect catalog picture of trees and buildings and kids with bright futures carrying backpacks. Nothing dark or odd or out of place.
I control my awareness
, she said to herself pointlessly.
It does not control me.
A swath of gray clouds washed the sun away, and the air grew cooler. Finley kept moving, passing a beat-up landscaping truck parked near the sidewalk. Beside it, an old man in a wide straw hat languidly trimmed stray branches with an enormous pair of clippers. She felt his eyes on her, but his face was in the shadow of his hat brim.
He wasn’t the only one staring. A few feet away stood another man, this one young, tousled, leaned against the wall of the building, smoking a cigarette, pinching it between his thumb and forefinger. Baggy jeans, sweatshirt too big. Looked like he could use a shower. Had she seen him before?
“Nice ride,” he said as she drew nearer.
He had sunken hazel eyes and the determined slouch of the very tall. He must have been over six feet. She
did
know him, actually. He always sat in the back row of the lecture hall. He had a look about him that she knew too well, heavy lidded and glassy—a stoner like the people she was trying to get away from in Seattle. She could even smell it on him a little, that sweet tang under the tobacco.
“Thanks,” she said, glancing behind her. The roadster was out of sight, but he must have seen her ride in.
“Ready for the exam?” he asked.
The noise had quieted a bit, but she could still hear it. What did it mean? Was she supposed to know why the noise had come back?
She glanced around, but as per usual in The Hollows, there was nothing to see but trees and sky. Not that it was a bad thing, really,
the nothingness. She needed a little less excitement in her life, didn’t she? That’s why she’d come here—to get quiet, to study, to learn more about her abilities from Eloise, to figure out what the hell she was going to do with her life. In the absolutely-zero-going-on department, The Hollows seemed happy to oblige.
“Maybe,” she said. “You?”
“I might do okay,” he said.
He offered a smile that managed to be sweet and a little mischievous all at once.
He stuck out a hand. “Jason,” he said.
“Finley.”
The sound was gone. She looked around and there was just the landscaper trimming,
snip, snip, snip
. Finley sensed that the gardener was still staring beneath the wide brim of that hat. She couldn’t see his face really, but she could feel the heat of his gaze.
Dirty old man.
In another life, she’d have flipped him off. But she was trying to invite less trouble into her life.
Our choices, even the small one
s, all have consequences
, her mother always said. Giving some old gardener the finger was probably a fine example of a bad choice.
She was about to go inside instead when she saw them in the distance by the tall oak tree. The Three Sisters—Abigail, Sarah, and Patience, daughters of Faith Good and Finley’s distant relatives on the maternal side (obviously). They had been dancing in the periphery of Finley’s life since she was a little girl, her constant companions, friends, troublemakers, confidantes, and whisperers of secret things. They’d been strangely quiet, in fact mostly absent, since Finley had arrived in The Hollows. Now, here they were. Patience sitting quietly, bent over a book, her dark hair pulled back into a tight bun, collar buttoned up to her chin; Abigail spinning around pointlessly, long skirts and wild auburn hair flouncing, like a child playing a game only she understood; Sarah, pale and blonde, watching her, laughing. As ever, Finley was as pleased to see them as she was wary.
What are you up to, girls?
And then they were gone.
“I was going to grab some coffee,” she said after a moment of watching. “And go over my notes.”
If he wondered what she was staring at, he didn’t ask.
“Sounds like a plan,” he said. He followed her inside to the small commissary adjacent to the psych building.
The coffee at the commissary wasn’t too bad. She ordered a double shot and sat down at a table by the window, opened her notebook. Jason sat across from her, took out his laptop.
“You’re old school, huh?”
“I guess so,” she said.
She took notes in class, then copied them over when she got home. That’s how her mom had taught her to study. Even though most people had their laptops or tablets in class, tapping all through the lecture, Finley still preferred the black-and-white mottled composition notebook. Things didn’t seem real unless they were written in ink on paper. Words on a screen floated, seemed virtual and insubstantial. Ink sank in and stayed, rooted in the real world.
Finley hadn’t exactly invited Jason to sit, and she was afraid that he was going to keep talking, but he didn’t. In fact, there was something so easy about his energy that she forgot he was there as they read in silence and then walked together to class. He gave her a nod as if to say good luck, and they each went to the seats they had occupied all semester. Then she pushed him out of her head. No boys. She had enough trouble with Rainer, her ex-boyfriend from Seattle who had followed her—unbidden—to The Hollows and was now, annoyingly, tending bar at Jake’s Pub, a cop hangout just off the town square.
* * *
Finley took her exam, losing time and herself as she focused on the pages in front of her. The
squeak-clink
had receded to just the faintest whisper on the edge of her consciousness, and for a time she forgot about it altogether.
TWO
T
rees made Merri Gleason anxious now, especially when there were so many of them and nothing else. They stood sentry, an impenetrable green wall on either side of the road, ancient and knowing, looking down. How long had they stood there, she found herself wondering, watching in that impervious, detached way? What had they witnessed? If she was honest, she’d always been a bit suspicious of nature—unlike her husband. All the things he loved about it— the quiet, the solitude, the separation from the hectic busyness of modern life—made her nervous and edgy.
She glanced at her cell phone mounted on the dash. No signal. That made her nervous, too. The car
wouldn’t
break down, but if it
did
, how long would it be before anyone drove past? How long would she sit on the shoulder of the road among the trees? Would she be forced to walk? She hadn’t seen another vehicle in she didn’t know how long. And P.S.—what was she
doing
here? Her errand, which seemed so right and true, so hopeful a few hours ago, now just felt a little crazy.
As if in answer to her anxious thoughts, a car rounded the bend behind her. She breathed through a welcome pulse of relief. But before long, the sleek black BMW with dark tinted windows flashed its blinker, then passed her and sped out of sight. She glanced at the speedometer. She
was
driving too slowly, not even forty miles an hour in a fifty-mile-an-hour zone. The truth was, she wasn’t the best driver. A New Yorker born and raised—a
Manhattanite
—she’d rather
never
be behind the wheel of a car. She had her license but
hadn’t driven regularly in years when her husband Wolf insisted that they needed to start getting out of the city more with the kids. Why they needed an eighty-three-thousand-dollar Range Rover was another matter.
Because we live in an urban jungle, baby,
he’d joked. More seriously:
And you need a lot of metal around you.
She picked up speed, feeling more alone and vulnerable by the second. The trees were soldiers, surrounding her, menacing and grave. Give her the bustle and chaotic energy of an urban landscape any day. There was
life
in a city, the unmistakable throb of people doing, thinking, wanting, rushing.
Merri hadn’t even
wanted
to rent the cabin last summer. If Wolf hadn’t gone ahead and booked it without even asking her (
It’s called a
surprise
, honey. Remember those?
), she’d have said no.
The idea of being unplugged, of long walks through the woods, of canoeing and picnics, of days where they could
just be together as a family,
cooking, reading, whatever it was that people did before they were slaves to schoolwork, and activities, and play dates, and endless birthday parties at Extreme Bounce? Before Netflix and iPads and smart phones and laptops? Well, when it came right down to it, it didn’t exactly thrill her.
Because mainly what would wind up happening was that Wolf
would go off and try to connect with his inner adventurer.
It’s the only place where we’re truly free
, Wolf would exclaim. To Merri, the kind of “freedom” Wolf was talking about just meant “without structure.” And without structure, there was no control. No mother liked being out of control when her kids were part of the equation. But Wolf didn’t get that, because he never factored in his kids when he was making plans.
And the kids wouldn’t want to go with him on the excursions he planned because Wolf’s idea of fun was not fun for anyone else. (And when the kids got tired, started complaining as they would invariably do, or Merri dared to utter even the slightest note that maybe they’d had enough, Wolf would get peevish and he and Merri would start fighting. And what was supposed to be fun would just wind up sucking hard, as Jackson might put it.)
So to avoid that inevitable scenario, Merri would just let Wolf go off and do whatever he wanted to do, while she, Abbey, and Jackson would stay behind and play Monopoly (or Sorry! or Old Maid)—until someone had a tantrum. Or maybe she’d read aloud from
The Giver
, which she wanted the kids to read (but neither of them really wanted to). Or they’d go for a short walk until Abbey fell and scraped her knee, or Jackson started complaining about bugs. Like Merri, neither Abbey nor Jackson shared Wolf’s exact degree of enthusiasm for the out of doors.
So, Merri had been envisioning a weekend where she would end up entertaining Abbey (eight going on thirteen) and Jackson (thirteen going on eight) while her husband (forty-six going on eighteen) would disappear on hikes or whatever and take a bunch of selfies. He would then create a narrative of the trip, and in the
telling
of it later to friends, it would sound like the perfect family vacation. Because that’s how it went with Wolf, no matter where they were. Though, of course, he would completely deny that.
What do you mean “create a narrative”? That’s what happened!
You were there!
But those were the thoughts belonging to another version of Merri. The woman she was today as she drove up the winding rural road was so far away from that woman who worried about things like vacations, and not having time to work out, and whose turn was it to do the laundry. Those were luxury problems, the kind of problems people had when they had no real problems.
When she thought about the petty complaints that used to bring her and Wolf to screaming matches that sent the kids scuttling to their rooms—the ones that spanned days, had him sleeping on the couch—she was ashamed of herself. Literally
ashamed
. She would pay money to care about things like that again—his adrenaline addiction, how he spent too much time on the computer, how she
knew
he still jerked off to porn, how his “epic” nights with the boys left him reeking and completely useless the next day. But these days she only cared about one thing. Everything else in her life had turned to ash.
A big sign loomed to her right: Welcome to The Hollows. Population 9780. Established 1603. She breathed a sigh of relief, knowing that the town was just another fifteen minutes away. If the car broke down now, which it wouldn’t, she could theoretically walk. (Though her ruined knee ached at just the thought.)
Silence. No radio, she couldn’t stand the sound of chattering voices. Even NPR with its dulcet tones of liberal self-righteousness, or the classical music station on Sirius, things that once had been soothing, now grated on her nerves. Jackson and Wolf were back in Manhattan. Even
they
were moving on in the ways that they could: Wolf was working again; Jackson was back in school. But not Merri. No. She had stepped into quicksand and she was up to her chin, stuck and sinking fast.
If Wolf knew where she was, he’d have her committed—again. The first time, she barely remembered. She couldn’t recall the exact events that had led to her hospitalization or the time she spent there—except for these kind of shadow memories—soft lighting and gentle voices, a kind of floating cloud feeling. She liked to think of it as a brownout. Just a momentary dimming of circuitry, her system overwhelmed by grief and rage and loss. Anyway, she couldn’t go back to that place—literally or figuratively. Time was running out; she didn’t know how she knew that, but she did. Her instincts were powerful and usually dead on, even when she ignored them, which she often (too often) did.
She followed the signs and pulled off the rural road and into the quaint and tony town square. She remembered being impressed by just how pretty and clean The Hollows was when they’d first arrived; she’d even briefly (like for five seconds) entertained that fantasy about moving from the city out to a place like this.
Wolf was right
, she’d thought.
This is going to be a nice getaway. And we are overdue for some time off.
On their way to the cabin, they’d spent the first afternoon having lunch at the little diner. Then they’d wandered around and browsed in the cute boutiques—blankets and sweaters made from wool harvested from local sheep; simple, stylish clothing as nice
and high quality as anything you’d find in the city; a glass and pottery shop—grabbing (really great!) lattes for her and Wolf and frozen hot chocolates for the kids at the Java Stop. She made a mental note to come in the morning to pick up pastries at The Fluffy Muffin.
“Where did you hear about this place?” Merri had asked.
“You know,” he said, shaking his head. “I can’t even remember. An article in the
Times
maybe? One of those 36 Hours pieces?”
“Such a weird name for a town, isn’t it?”
“I like it,” he said. “It’s a little creepy-cool.”
“Must be pretty in the fall,” she’d mused.
Then they’d driven up to the place he’d rented on the lake. She had to admit when they got there that he’d been right; it was idyllic. She immediately felt lighter, more relaxed than she had been in a long while. A beautiful log cabin sat nestled among tall oak and pine trees. A wide blue lake glittered at the end of a long dock.
“Wow!” said Jackson, looking up from his iPad (for the first time in three years). As soon as the car came to a stop, Jackson burst out and made a beeline for the tire swing. Abbey hung back with Merri, always the cautious one, the careful one (at first). She clung to Merri’s hips.
“I saw a wasp,” she said.
“It’s okay,” said Merri, pulling her close. “It’s pretty here. We’re going to have fun.”
Wolf spun around, arms open. “So? Did Daddy do good?”
That he was energized by natural places was one of the things she first loved about him. She used to say that Wolf, in the beginning, before the kids, brought her out of the controlled climates and sanitized and quiet environments she preferred and into the air. And he would say that she’d taught him it was okay to have his feet on the ground sometimes. He was the writer; she was the editor. He was the one repelling into the ravine; she was the one making sure the rope was secure. They were proud of how they’d balanced each other, yin and yang. She was disappointed at the cliché they became
later, how the things she’d loved at first grew to infuriate her. And visa versa. More than anything else, resentment was the death of love. It killed slowly.
“You did good, Daddy,” Merri conceded. You did
well
, she said inside. If she’d corrected him out loud, the smile he wore would have faded. He hated when she did that, when she acted the “grammar Nazi.” But language was a precision instrument. Used imprecisely it could level all kinds of damage.
“I know, I know,” he said. His smile faded anyway. “I did
well
.”
“I didn’t say anything,” she said too quickly.
But they were
at that point
, even then. The grooves of anger and resentment were dug so deep, words weren’t even necessary to start an argument. Just a glance could do it. Even things unsaid were as loud as a shout.
“Jackson,” she called. “Be careful.”
The swing chain, rusty where it wrapped around the branch, was wearing a deep gash in the wood. It
looked
as though it could break apart at any moment.
“He’s fine,” said Wolf. Just the shade of annoyance, nothing more, but it evoked all the criticisms he leveled at her. She was too protective, hovering, coddling.
You’re turning him into a pussy,
he’d spat at her during one argument
.
Which managed to be vulgar and misogynistic and unfair to both her and Jackson all at once. He’d apologized for saying it, but she hadn’t forgotten it. Because, according to Wolf, she never forgot
anything
, and she
never
forgave.
The house was beautiful, too. A log cabin, with big plush furniture, a fireplace and chef’s kitchen, a sleeping loft for the kids, a beautiful master bedroom for them, with a hot tub outside sliding doors, looking out onto a mountain vista beyond the lake. They swam all afternoon. Jackson and Wolf tried fishing but didn’t catch anything. They’d bought groceries in town, grilled burgers that night.
After the kids fell into an exhausted sleep, Merri and Wolf made love in the big king bed. And it was still there, all the heat they’d
had the first time. She loved the look of him, his lean body, his wild tangle of dark curls, the curve of the strong but not huge muscles on his arms. The caramel color of his skin, the stubble on his jaw. Her body
always
responded to his; he could
always
make her his. They’d made promises for this trip. They both had skins they wanted to shed and things they wanted to give up. They’d each made big mistakes, done damage to themselves, to each other, to their marriage. But the love was there, something deep and true between them. It was enough to get them through the mire of their problems. Merri believed that then.
She fell asleep that night thinking how funny it was that in a bad (was it bad?) marriage, vitriol and intimacy lay side by side like the stripes on a tiger.
As
the stripes on a tiger. Maybe, she thought, there was still hope for them. They’d come through their struggles, stronger and better than they were before. She’d actually thought that back then.
That night seemed like a lifetime ago, though it hadn’t even been a year. The navigation computer told her to turn left now and she did so.
“Your destination is on the right in one-tenth of a mile.”
She drifted down the pretty block until she saw the address on a mailbox up ahead. She slowed in front of a gorgeous Victorian house that sat beneath the shade of a big oak tree. Leaves drifted onto the hood of her car in the wind. The day was overcast, neither sunny nor especially gray. She crept closer, heart thumping. This was it; she knew this. It was her last chance. Far worse than that, it was Abbey’s. Desperation clawed at her insides; she was bleeding from it.
It might be time to let go
, her shrink had advised.
Let go?
she’d asked. She must have stared, incredulous.
Let my daughter go?