The Insides (25 page)

Ulysses kills the engine. Ollie looks at the familiar length of curving driveway, flanked by a pair of unruly sycamores.

“You’re sure you want to do this?” he asks.

“Maybe
want
is the wrong word,” Ollie says. “But no. Yeah. I’ll be all right.”

“I’ll wait here,” Ulysses says. “You know. In case you’re not.”

“I appreciate it,” says Ollie. She pinches the bridge of her nose for a long time. Then she opens her eyes and gathers up her messenger bag, with Guychardson’s box safe inside of it. With her free hand, she opens the door, and then steps out into the driveway and begins to walk. She doesn’t look back.

The house comes into view. She can see that the windows are open. She can see the stirring of curtains, curtains that she made. She can hear the hum of a fan. And as she draws closer she repeats Ulysses’s words,
You’re sure you want to do this
. Not quite a question when he said them. She repeats her answer:
Maybe
want
is the wrong word
.

And as she takes a step onto the porch, she thinks:
Of course
want
is the wrong word
. This is the last place she ever wanted to return to. She’s spent a year trying to forget everything about this farm and her life here. A year spent trying not to fix the past. Because it’s stupid to try to do that. You can’t fix the past, not unless you cheat, not unless you’re willing to cut space and time and fight the faceless monsters that live back there. And she won’t cheat.

So why are you even here?
she asks.

Because this isn’t trying to fix the past
, she tells herself.
This is fixing the future
.

She stands there on the porch, where she used to sit. She remembers the things she used to do here: sorting potatoes into plastic bins, knocking dirt off turnips, holding her child on her knees.

She crosses the porch, stands in front of the door. She does not knock. She cannot bring herself to knock. She’s passed through this door probably thousands of times and never once lifted her hand to knock on it.

This is my home
, she tells herself.

Not anymore, it isn’t
, comes the reply.

Nevertheless, she lifts her hand and puts it on the handle of the door. She opens it and sticks her head in.

She tries to call out
hello
but her voice doesn’t seem to want to work in here. The word comes out as a whisper. Maybe it never comes out at all.

She steps the rest of the way inside. The vision she had a few days ago led her to expect some of the mess she sees here, in the kitchen: the drift of cardboard boxes stacked against one wall. Loose bits of air packaging collecting in the corners. The counter overtaken with a spread of dirty pots and pans.

She crosses through, into the dining room. The table still has Donald’s compound bow on it, now restrung. She drops her bag on the table just like she used to do, at the end of a long day, just to feel what it feels like to give in to the habitual, once again, after this long year.

It doesn’t feel bad.

And then, just like he used to do, Donald walks into the room. He walks into the room and he looks at her.

And when he sees her he stops walking, and it’s not like it used to be at all. It wouldn’t be, it couldn’t be, it can’t be. Of course it can’t. He appears, for a moment, to hold his breath. He blinks very rapidly.

“Holy hell,” he says finally. “Are you OK?”

She thinks that maybe this is the question she would most have wanted him to ask, although she doesn’t have an answer.

“I saw what happened—” he begins. “At Carnage—”

“Yeah,” she says. “I got your message. And I just—I hope you don’t mind that I’m here—”

“No,” Donald says, taking a step closer to her. Closing the gap. “Not at all—”

“It’s just—it just felt important—to see you and Jesse—”

Donald comes in to hold her.

“Is this OK?” he asks, as his arms go around her, in the old, familiar way.

“I think so,” Ollie says. “I don’t know,” she says next, although her arms are going around him, too. “Is it OK for you?”

“I think so,” Donald says, murmuring it down into her ear. “I—yes.”

Looking over his shoulder, she watches as Jesse enters the room. Her son, standing there, at last. He’s not wearing clown makeup, for which she experiences the briefest moment of gratitude, a moment dashed when she witnesses the expression on his face when he first sees her. It’s an expression of confusion, maybe even alarm: the look of seeing your father embraced by a stranger. She will never forget seeing these emotions cross the face of her child upon her reappearance. She will remember the sight for the rest of her life.

The expression itself passes quickly, however; it’s replaced by surprise, elation. “Mom—?” Jesse blurts.

She releases Donald and opens her arms, hoping that her son will come to her, nearly praying, incanting in her
head a loop of
please
,
please
,
please. Let him come to me
. And he does. He slams into her with all the ferocity that his boy’s body can contain, and she wraps it in her strong arms.

And Donald wraps his arms around the both of them, and just like that the circle—the circle of Ollie and Donald and Jesse, broken long ago—reforms. Maybe not forever. Maybe just for a moment, just for as long as it takes for this moment, in which they hang together, to resolve. Maybe the moment will end, and they’ll rise, and they’ll begin to argue, and the circle will come apart again. Ollie doesn’t know. They could break apart at any time. But for right now she holds Jesse, and Donald holds them both, and all three together they wait for the future to hit.

Maja and Pig came off the highway a while ago, and have been driving along a two-lane road flanked by thick stands of trees, by occasional long walls made of stone. She watches out the passenger-side window and observes the topology of these stacked stones as they flicker past: the softened edges of granite taken from creeks, the harder edges of bluestone cut from the earth. She begins to derive a sense of the hundreds of quarries in this part of the state: she holds their interrelationship in her head like a map. A network of holes in her mind. A sense that, taken together, understood as one shape, they would form some single system, a set of secret passageways, interlinking at some depth to which she has not yet delved.

She recognizes this as an error, a fantasy of escape. The dream of having some place where she could deny the awareness of whatever lies ahead. Really just a wish to return to her childhood closet, the place where she used to hide. Not that hiding ever helped her, not that it ever made the future
less frightening. The only thing that ever helped was just to keep looking, clear-eyed, toward whatever was yet to come.

And so she blinks the fantasy away impatiently and turns her attention away from the passenger-side window and looks instead out through the windshield, straight at where they’re going. She reconcentrates on the trace of the blade, which passed up this very road, beneath the arches of these trees, through this August light, less than an hour ago. Its trail so clear.

They descend into a vale, shadows drifting across the car. Before long, a driveway comes into view, twenty yards ahead, flanked by a pair of giant sycamores. The trail of the blade emerges from a Buick, just barely visible beyond the second of the big trees, and leads up the driveway.

“Stop the car,” Maja says.

Pig pulls over onto the shoulder.

“It’s here,” she says.

Pig kills the engine. “This is it, then,” he says. “End of the road.”

It never pays to be certain
, Maja thinks, but she remains silent.

Pig pauses, and an unusually reflective expression troubles his face.

“Quiet around here,” he says, after a minute’s gone by.

“Yes,” Maja says.

“That’s probably good,” Pig says.

“Yes,” Maja says again.

“I wanna check something,” he says. “Get my phone. It’s in the glove box.”

Maja roots around among the filthy maps and manuals
in there until she finds a clear plastic bag containing Pig’s phone and its battery. She hands it over to him. He reassembles the phone, powers it on, waits a solid minute for signal. He gives a single grunt of satisfaction when he finds none and he disassembles the phone again, puts the two pieces back into the bag, and tosses it onto the dash.

“OK,” he says.

He exits the car, and Maja follows him. Together they stand at the edge of a roadside thicket of trees, peering through branches and leaves, to get a view of the farmhouse that lies beyond.

“In there?” he asks.

“Yes,” Maja says.

Pig spits into the dirt.

They head back to the car, around to the trunk. Pig pops it open and Maja watches as he rummages in there for a minute, until finally he gets his hands on the case containing the carbine rifle, hauls it up into his arms.

The Archive notices something. Hears something. Footsteps on road gravel.

Hey, um
, it says.

Maja looks away from Pig and then she sees the man for the first time, the man who is standing there, twenty feet away from them. Startled, she jerks; in an attempt to recover she quickly pulls knowledge out of him, figures out who he is: he’s the driver of the Buick, the one who brought the woman here. Stupid to have missed him before, stupid to have been too focused on the blade’s path up the driveway to have bothered looking inside the car—fucking
stupid
.

“Shit,” she says.

Pig looks up, alerted by the word slipping out of her unguarded mouth. He sees the man, and his face breaks into a wide, malevolent smile.

“Howdy, neighbor,” he says.

The man looks from her, to Pig, to the rifle case in Pig’s arms, and back to her again, his eyes narrowed with suspicion.

“You ain’t my neighbor,” the man says, after a beat. “So why don’t you tell me if there’s a thing I could
help
you two with.”

Pig sighs, lowers the case down onto the roadside. “How about this,” Pig says, from his crouch. “How about you help me by dying when I shoot you in your fucking face?”

He stands, draws the gun from his waistband. But Ulysses has already turned and started running up the driveway. Pig aims sloppily, as though he already knows he’ll miss, and he fires. The noise cracks the air, but the shot misses by a mile. He squeezes off another shot, seemingly out of pure perversity, at Ulysses’s vanishing back.

Pig scowls. “OK,” he says. “I think it’s time.”

“Time for what?” Maja asks.

“Time,” Pig says, “to switch to the big gun.”

The front door of the house crashes open. Ollie shrieks, but it’s only Ulysses: he bursts through the kitchen and appears in the doorway. Thank God he’s safe. But of course he isn’t safe. None of them are safe. She heard the gunshots. She knows what they mean.

He followed us
, she thinks.
I don’t know how he did it but he followed us
.

Everyone is speaking at once. Donald is looking angrily at Ulysses and saying, “Jesus,
him
?” Ulysses is looking at her, bellowing, “There’s a man with a gun.” Jesse is looking from the face of one adult to the next and crying out, “Mom?”

Ollie, for her part, says, “We have to get out of here.” She says this almost automatically, just to have some response. Just to say something. Even as she’s saying it she can feel how worthless it is. Because where could they even go? She turns around and looks through the glass of the sliding door, looks across the weedy sprawl out behind the house. Yes, she can plot a path along which they could flee:
across the field, toward the safety of the woods, into the dark spaces beyond. But then what? How long before he catches up to them again? He followed her all the way out here, to the heart of the house at the farm, the safest place she can imagine, a place she’d hidden even from herself. There’s nowhere else to go. She doesn’t want a different direction to run in; she wants a way to make it end.

But she doesn’t know how to make it end.

And that’s what she’s thinking when she sees him loom up in the field, the pig-headed man a demonic silhouette, ablaze in the sunset, she sees him raise a rifle and begin to take aim—

“Get down,” she shouts. “Under the table.” And she turns, and grabs her son’s hands, and together they drop. There’s a confusion then: human limbs jostle for position among the chair legs. It seems like everyone’s made it beneath but before she can be sure the back door bursts. Chunks of tempered glass scribble and bounce across the tabletop, like a curtain of noise draped above their heads, drowning out their screams.

Fuck
, Ollie thinks, as the rifle continues to pop.
Fuck
. She brought this here, this pig-faced thing, this unstoppable appetite, she brought it to the one place she cared about and now it’s going to devour them, all of them, one at a time. Unless she does something.

She clambers out. The thing is there, at the door, kicking at the chunks of glass still standing in the frame. She lifts a chair by its leg and flings it at the thing. The thing shoulders the chair away, fumbles with slapping a new clip into the rifle. They have just a moment.

“Come on,” she screams. She reaches under the tabletop, gets her son’s hands, yanks him out. She looks into his face as he stands, and she feels so sorry: sorry for her presence, and the disaster that it’s brought upon them; sorry for her absence, a disaster of a different sort. But she’s surprised to see the expression on his face. It’s frightened—it’s terrified—but beyond that she can see trust. After everything, he still trusts her to get them out of here alive. And she wants, very badly, to be worthy of that. It’s exactly enough to keep her moving.

“Go,” she says. She turns away from the thing coming through the door, puts her back between it and Jesse. She puts her hands on Jesse to help propel him. She looks at the table, sees her bag lying there among the glass, but she can’t take her hands from her boy.