The Girls

11

I got caught; of course I did.

Mrs. Dutton on her kitchen floor, calling my name like a right answer. And I hesitated for just a moment — a stunned, bovine reaction to my own name, the knowledge that I should help the fallen Mrs. Dutton — but Suzanne and Donna were far ahead, and by the time I jarred back into that realization, they had almost disappeared. Suzanne turned back just long enough to see Mrs. Dutton clamp a trembling hand on my arm.

—

My mother’s pained and baffled declarations: I was a failure. I was pathological. She wore the air of crisis like a flattering new coat, the stream of her anger performed for an invisible jury. She wanted to know who had broken into the Dutton house with me.

“Judy saw two girls with you,” she said. “Maybe three. Who were they?”

“Nobody.” I tended my rigid silence like a suitor, full of honorable feelings. Before she and Donna disappeared, I tried to flash Suzanne a message: I would take responsibility. She didn’t have to worry. I understood why they’d left me behind. “It was just me,” I said.

Anger made her words garbled. “You can’t stay in this house and spout lies.”

I could see how rattled she was by this confusing new situation. Her daughter had never been a problem before, had always zipped along without resistance, as tidy and self-contained as those fish that clean their own tanks. And why would she bother to expect otherwise or even prepare herself for the possibility?

“You told me you were going to Connie’s all summer,” my mother said. Almost shouting. “You said it so many times. Right to my face. And guess what? I called Arthur. He says you haven’t been there in months. Almost two months.”

My mother looked like an animal then, her face made strange with rage, a gaspy run of tears.

“You’re a liar. You lied about that. You’re lying about this, too.” Her hands were clenched hard. She kept lifting them, then dropping them at her sides.

“I was seeing friends,” I snapped. “I have other friends besides Connie.”

“Other friends. Sure. You were out screwing some boyfriend, God knows what. Nasty little liar.” She was barely looking at me, her words as compulsive and fevered as the muttered obscenities of a pervert. “Maybe I should take you down to the juvenile detention center. Is that what you want? It’s clear to me I just can’t control you anymore. I’ll let them have you. See if they can straighten you out.”

I wrenched away, but even in the hallway, even with my door closed, I could still hear my mother at her bitter chant.

—

Frank was called in as reinforcement: I watched from the bed as he took my bedroom door off its hinges. He was careful and quiet, though it took him a while, and he eased the door out of the frame as if it were made of glass instead of cheapo hollow-core. He placed it against the wall gently. Then hovered for a moment in the now empty doorway. Rattling the screws in his hands like dice.

“Sorry about this,” he said, like he was just the hired help, the maintenance man carrying out my mother’s wishes.

I didn’t want to have to notice the actual kindness in his eyes, how immediately it drained my hateful narration of Frank of any real heat. I could picture him in Mexico for the first time, slightly sunburned so the hair on his arm turned platinum. Sipping a lemon soda while overseeing his gold mine — I pictured a cave whose interior was cobblestoned in stony growths of gold.

I kept expecting Frank to tell my mother about the stolen money. Pile on more problems to the list. But he didn’t. Maybe he’d seen that she was already angry enough. Frank kept up a silent vigil at the table during her many phone calls with my father while I listened from the hallway. Her high-pitched complaints, all her questions squeezed to a panicked register. What kind of person breaks into a neighbor’s house? A family I’d known my whole life?

“For no reason,” she added shrilly. A pause. “You think I haven’t asked her? You think I haven’t tried?”

Silence.

“Oh, sure, right, I bet. You want to try?”

And so I was sent to Palo Alto.

—

I spent two weeks at my father’s apartment. Across from a Denny’s, the Portofino Apartments as blocky and empty as my mother’s house was sprawling and dense. Tamar and my father had moved into the biggest unit, and everywhere were the still lifes of adulthood she had so obviously arranged: a bowl of waxed fruit on the counter, the bar cart with its unopened bottles of liquor. The carpet that held the bland tracks of the vacuum.

Suzanne would forget me, I thought, the ranch would hurtle on without me and I’d have nothing. My sense of persecution gobbled up and grew fat off these worries. Suzanne was like a soldier’s hometown sweetheart, made gauzy and perfect by distance. But maybe part of me was relieved. To take some time away. The Dutton house had spooked me, the blank cast I’d seen in Suzanne’s face. These were little bites, little inward shifts and discomforts, but even so, they were there.

What had I expected, living with my father and Tamar? That my father would try to sleuth out the source of my behavior? That he would punish me, act like a father? He seemed to feel punishment was a right he’d relinquished and treated me with the courtly politeness you’d extend to an aging parent.

He startled when he first saw me — it had been over two months. He seemed to remember that he should hug me and made a lurching step in my direction. I noticed a new bunching at his ears, and his cowboy shirt was one I had never seen before. I knew I looked different, too. My hair was longer and wild at the edges, like Suzanne’s. My ranch dress was so worn I could hook my thumb through the sleeve. My father made a move to help me with my bag, but I’d already hefted it into the backseat before he reached me.

“Thanks, though,” I said, trying to smile.

His hands spread at his sides, and when he smiled back, it was with the helpless apology of a foreigner who needed directions repeated. My brain, to him, was a mysterious magic trick that he could only wonder at. Never bothering to puzzle out the hidden compartment. As we took our seats, I could sense that he was gathering himself to invoke the parental script.

“I don’t have to lock you in your room, do I?” he said. His halting laugh. “No breaking in to anyone’s house?”

When I nodded, he visibly relaxed. Like he’d gotten something out of the way.

“It’s a good time for you to visit,” he went on, as if this were all voluntary. “Now that we’re settled. Tamar’s real particular about the furniture and stuff.” He started the ignition, already beyond any mention of trouble. “She went all the way to the flea market in Half Moon Bay to get this bar cart.”

There was a brief moment I wanted to reach for him across the seat, to draw a line from myself to the man who was my father, but the moment passed.

“You can pick the station,” he offered, seeming as shy to me as a boy at a dance.

—

The first few days, all three of us had been nervous. I got up early to make the bed in the guest room, trying to heft the decorative pillows back into completion. My life was limited to my drawstring purse and my duffel of clothes, an existence I tried to keep as neat and invisible as possible. Like camping, I thought, like a little adventure in self-reliance. The first night, my father brought home a cardboard tub of ice cream, striated with chocolate, and scooped free heroic amounts. Tamar and I just picked at ours, but my father made a point of eating another bowl. He kept glancing up, as if we could confirm his own pleasure. His women and his ice cream.

Tamar was the surprise. Tamar in her terry shorts and shirt from a college I had never heard of. Who waxed her legs in the bathroom with a complicated device that filled the apartment with the humidity of camphor. Her attendant unguents and hair oils, the fingernails whose lunar surfaces she studied for signs of nutritional deficiencies.

At first, she seemed unhappy with my presence. The awkward hug she offered, like she was grimly accepting the task of being my new mother. And I was disappointed, too. She was just a girl, not the exotic woman I’d once imagined — everything I’d thought was special about her was actually just proof of what Russell would call a straight world trip. Tamar did what she was supposed to. Worked for my father, wore her little suit. Aching to be someone’s wife.

But then her formality quickly melted away, the veil of adulthood she wore as temporarily as a costume. She let me rummage through the quilted pouch that held her makeup, her blowsy perfume bottles, watching with the pride of a true collector. She pushed a blouse of hers, with bell sleeves and pearl buttons, onto me.

“It’s just not my style anymore.” She shrugged, picking at a loose thread. “But it’ll look good on you, I know. Elizabethan.”

And it did look good. Tamar knew those things. She knew the calorie count of most foods, which she recited in sarcastic tones, like she was making fun of her own knowledge. She cooked vegetable vindaloo. Pots of lentils coated with a yellow sauce that gave off an unfamiliar brightness. The roll of powdery antacids my father swallowed like candy. Tamar held out her cheek for my father to kiss but swatted him away when he tried to hold her hand.

“You’re all sweaty,” she said. When my father saw that I had noticed, he laughed a little but seemed embarrassed.

My father was amused at our collusion. But it sometimes shook out so we were laughing at him. Once Tamar and I were talking about Spanky and Our Gang, and he chimed in. Like the Little Rascals, he figured. Tamar and I looked at each other.

“It’s a band,” she said. “You know, that rock-and-roll music the kids like.” And my father’s confused, orphaned face set us off again.

—

They had a fancy turntable that Tamar often spoke of moving to another corner or room for varying acoustic or aesthetic reasons. She constantly mentioned future plans for oak flooring and crown moldings and even different dish towels, though the planning itself seemed to satisfy. The music she played was more slick than the ranch racket. Jane Birkin and her froggy old-man husband, Serge.

“She’s pretty,” I said, studying the record cover. And she was, tan as a nut with a delicate face, those rabbit teeth. Serge was disgusting. His songs about Sleeping Beauty, a girl who seemed most desirable because her eyes were always closed. Why would Jane love Serge? Tamar loved my father, the girls loved Russell. These men who were nothing like the boys I’d been told I would like. Boys with hairless chests and mushy features, the flocking of blemishes along their shoulders. I didn’t want to think of Mitch because it made me think of Suzanne — that night had happened somewhere else, in a little dollhouse in Tiburon with a tiny pool and a tiny green lawn. A dollhouse I could look onto from above, lifting the roof to see the rooms segmented like chambers of the heart. The bed the size of a matchbox.

Tamar was different from Suzanne in a way that was easier. She was not complicated. She didn’t track my attention so closely, didn’t prompt me to shore up her declarations. When she wanted me to move over, she said so. I relaxed, which was unfamiliar. Even so, I missed Suzanne — Suzanne, who I remembered like dreams of opening a door on a forgotten room. Tamar was sweet and kind, but the world she moved around in seemed like a television set: limited and straightforward and mundane, with the notations and structures of normality. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. There wasn’t a frightening gap between the life she was living and the way she thought about that life, a dark ravine I often sensed in Suzanne, and maybe in my own self as well. Neither of us could fully participate in our days, though later Suzanne would participate in a way she could never take back. I mean that we didn’t quite believe it was enough, what we were offered, and Tamar seemed to accept the world happily, as an end point. Her planning wasn’t actually about making anything different — she was just rearranging the same known quantities, puzzling out a new order like life was an extended seating chart.

—

Tamar made dinner while we waited for my father. She looked younger than usual — her face washed with the cleanser she’d explained had actual milk proteins in it, to prevent wrinkles. Her hair wet and darkening the shoulders of the big T-shirt she wore, her lace-edged cotton shorts. She belonged in a dorm room somewhere, eating popcorn and drinking beer.

“Hand me a bowl?”

I did, and Tamar set aside a portion of lentils. “Without spices.” She rolled her eyes. “For the tender heart’s stomach.”

I had a bitter flash of my mother doing that for my father: little consolations, little adjustments, making the world mirror my father’s wants. Buying him ten pairs of the same socks so he never mismatched.

“It’s almost like he’s a kid sometimes, you know?” Tamar said, pinching out a measure of turmeric. “I left him for a weekend, and there was nothing to eat when I came back but beef jerky and an onion. He’d die if he had to take care of himself.” She looked at me. “But I probably shouldn’t tell you this, huh?”

Tamar wasn’t being mean, but it surprised me — her ease in dismantling my father. It hadn’t occurred to me before, not really, that he could be a figure of fun, someone who could make mistakes or act like a child or stumble helplessly around the world, needing direction.

Nothing terrible happened between me and my father. There was not a singular moment I could look back on, no shouting fight or slammed door. It was just the sense I got, a sense that seeped over everything until it seemed obvious, that he was just a normal man. Like any other. That he worried what other people thought of him, his eyes scatting to the mirror by the door. How he was still trying to teach himself French from a tape and I heard him repeating words to himself under his breath. The way his belly, which was bigger than I remembered, sometimes showed through the gap in his shirts. Exposing segments of skin, pink as a newborn’s.

“And I love your father,” Tamar said. Her words were careful, like she was being archived. “I do. He asked me to dinner six times before I said yes, but he was so nice about it. Like he knew I would say yes even before I did.”

She seemed to catch herself — both of us were thinking it. My father had been living at home. Sleeping in bed with my mother. Tamar flinched, obviously waiting for me to say as much, but I couldn’t muster any anger. That was the strange thing — I didn’t hate my father. He had wanted something. Like I wanted Suzanne. Or my mother wanted Frank. You wanted things and you couldn’t help it, because there was only your life, only yourself to wake up with, and how could you ever tell yourself what you wanted was wrong?

—

Tamar and I lay on the carpet, knees bent, heads angled toward the turntable. My mouth was still buzzing from the tartness of the orange juice we’d walked four blocks to buy from a stand. The wood heels of my sandals slapping the sidewalk, Tamar chatting happily in the warm summer dark.

My father came in and smiled, but I could tell he was annoyed by the music, the way it skittered on purpose. “Can you turn that down?” he asked.

“Come on,” Tamar said. “It’s not that loud.”

“Yeah,” I echoed, thrilled by the unfamiliarity of an ally.

“See?” Tamar said. “Listen to your daughter.” She reached blindly to pat at my shoulder. My father left without saying anything, then returned a minute later and lifted the needle, the room abruptly silent.

“Hey!” Tamar said, sitting up, but he was already stalking away and I heard the shower start in the bathroom. “Fuck you,” Tamar muttered. She got to her feet, the backs of her legs printed with the nub of the carpet. Glancing at me. “Sorry,” she said absently.

I heard her talking in low tones in the kitchen. She was on the phone, and I watched her fingers piercing the loops of the cord, over and over. Tamar laughed, covering her mouth as she did, cupping the receiver close. I had the uncomfortable certainty that she was laughing at my father.

I don’t know when I understood that Tamar would leave him. Not right away, but soon. Her mind was already somewhere else, writing a more interesting life for herself, one where my father and I would be the scenery to an anecdote. A detour from a larger, more correct journey. The redecoration of her own story. And who would my father have then, to make money for, to bring dessert home to? I imagined him opening the door on the empty apartment after a long day at work. How the rooms would be as he’d left them, undisturbed by another person’s living. And how there would be a moment, before he flicked on the light, when he might imagine a different life revealed within the darkness, something besides the lonely borders of the couch, the cushions still holding the shape of his own sleepy body.

—

A lot of young people ran away: you could do it back then just because you were bored. You didn’t even need a tragedy. Deciding to go back to the ranch wasn’t difficult. My other house wasn’t an option anymore, the ludicrous possibility of my mother dragging me to the police station. And what was there at my father’s? Tamar, the way she insisted on my youthful alliance. The chocolate pudding after dinner, cold from the refrigerator, like our daily allotment of pleasure.

Maybe before the ranch, that life would have been enough.

But the ranch proved that you could live at a rarer pitch. That you could push past these petty human frailties and into a greater love. I believed, in the way of adolescents, in the absolute correctness and superiority of my love. My own feelings forming the definition. Love of that kind was something my father and even Tamar could never understand, and of course I had to leave.

—

While I had been watching television all day in the stuffy, overheated dark of my father’s apartment, the ranch was going sour. Though I wasn’t aware to what degree until later. The problem was the record deal — it wasn’t going to happen, and that was not something Russell could accept. His hands were tied, Mitch told Russell; he could not force the record company to change their minds. Mitch was a successful musician, a talented guitar player, but he did not have that kind of power.

This was true — my night with Mitch seems piteous for that reason, a groundless whir of wheels. But Russell didn’t believe Mitch, or it didn’t matter anymore. Mitch became the convenient host for a universal sickness. The pacing rants that increased in frequency and length, Russell pinning it all on Mitch, that overfed Judas. The.22s traded for Buntlines, the frenzy of betrayal Russell worked in the others. Russell wasn’t even bothering to hide his anger anymore. Guy was bringing speed around, he and Suzanne running to the pump house, coming back with eyes black as berries. The target practice in the trees. The ranch had never been of the larger world, but it grew more isolated. No newspapers, no televisions, no radio. Russell began to turn away visitors and send Guy out with the girls on every garbage run. A shell hardening around the place.

I can imagine Suzanne waking up, those mornings, with no sense of the days passing. The food situation getting dire, everything tinted with mild decay. They didn’t eat much protein, their brains motoring on simple carbohydrates and the occasional peanut-butter sandwich. The speed that scraped Suzanne of feeling — she must have moved through the filtery electricity of her own numbness like moving through deep ocean.

Everyone, later, would find it unbelievable that anyone involved in the ranch would stay in that situation. A situation so obviously bad. But Suzanne had nothing else: she had given her life completely over to Russell, and by then it was like a thing he could hold in his hands, turning it over and over, testing its weight. Suzanne and the other girls had stopped being able to make certain judgments, the unused muscle of their ego growing slack and useless. It had been so long since any of them had occupied a world where right and wrong existed in any real way. Whatever instincts they’d ever had — the weak twinge in the gut, a gnaw of concern — had become inaudible. If those instincts had ever been detectable at all.

They didn’t have very far to fall — I knew just being a girl in the world handicapped your ability to believe yourself. Feelings seemed completely unreliable, like faulty gibberish scraped from a Ouija board. My childhood visits to the family doctor were stressful events for that reason. He’d ask me gentle questions: How was I feeling? How would I describe the pain? Was it more sharp or more spread out? I’d just look at him with desperation. I needed to be told, that was the whole point of going to the doctor. To take a test, be put through a machine that could comb my insides with radiated precision and tell me what the truth was.

Of course the girls didn’t leave the ranch: there is a lot that can be borne. When I was nine, I’d broken my wrist falling from a swing. The shocking crack, the blackout pain. But even then, even with my wrist swelling with a cuff of trapped blood, I insisted I was fine, that it was nothing, and my parents believed me right up until the doctor showed them the X-ray, the bones snapped clean.

12

As soon as I’d packed my duffel, the guest room already looked like no one had ever stayed there — my absence quickly absorbed, which was maybe the point of rooms like that. I’d figured Tamar and my father had already left for work, but when I came into the living room, my father grunted from the couch.

“Tamar’s buying orange juice or some stupid thing,” he said.

We sat together and watched television. Tamar was gone a long time. My father kept rubbing his freshly shaven jaw, his face seeming undercooked. The commercials embarrassed me with their strident feeling, how they seemed to mock our awkward quiet. My father’s nervous measurement of the silence. How I would have been, a month ago, tense with expectation. Dredging my life for some gem of experience to present to him. But I couldn’t summon that effort anymore. My father was both more knowable to me than he had ever been, and at the same time, more of a stranger — he was just a man, sensitive to spicy foods, guessing at his foreign markets. Plugging away at his French.

He stood up the moment he heard Tamar’s keys fussing in the door.

“We should have left thirty minutes ago,” he said.

Tamar glanced at me, reshouldered her purse. “Sorry.” She cut him a tight smile.

“You knew when we had to go,” he said.

“I said I was sorry.” She seemed, for a moment, genuinely sorry. But then her eyes drifted helplessly to the television, still on, and though she tried to click back to attention, I knew my father had noticed.

“You don’t even have any orange juice,” he said, his voice flickering with hurt.

—

A young couple was the first to pick me up. The girl’s hair was the color of butter, a blouse knotted at her waist, and she kept turning to smile and offer me pistachios from a bag. Kissing the boy so I could see her darting tongue.

I hadn’t hitchhiked before, not really. It made me nervous to have to be whatever strangers expected from a girl with long hair — I didn’t know what degree of outrage to show about the war, how to talk about the students who threw bricks at police or took over passenger planes, demanding to be flown to Cuba. I’d always been outside all that, like I was watching a movie about what should have been my own life. But it was different, now that I was heading to the ranch.

I kept imagining the moment when Tamar and my father, home from the office, would realize I was actually gone. They would understand slowly, Tamar probably coming to the conclusion faster than my father. The apartment empty, no trace of my things. And maybe my father would call my mother, but what could either of them do? What punishment could they possibly pass down? They didn’t know where I’d gone. I had moved beyond their purview. Even their concern was exciting, in its way: there would be a moment when they’d have to wonder why I’d left, some murky guilt rising to the surface, and they would have to feel the full force of it, even if it was only for a second.

The couple took me as far as Woodside. I waited in the parking lot of the Cal-Mart until I got a ride from a man in a rattly Chevrolet, on his way to Berkeley to drop off a motorcycle part. Every time he went over a pothole, his duct-taped glove compartment clattered. The shaggy trees flashed past the window, thick with sun, the purple stretch of the bay beyond. I held my purse on my lap. His name was Claude, and he seemed ashamed of how it jarred with his appearance. “My mother liked that French actor,” he mumbled.

Claude made a point of flipping through his wallet, showing me pictures of his own daughter. She was a chubby girl, the bridge of her nose pink. Her unfashionable sausage curls. Claude seemed to sense my pity, suddenly grabbing the wallet back.

“None of you girls should be doing this,” he said.

He shook his head and I saw how his face moved a little with concern for me, an acknowledgment, I thought, of how brave I was. Though I should have known that when men warn you to be careful, often they are warning you of the dark movie playing across their own brains. Some violent daydream prompting their guilty exhortations to “make it home safe.”

“See, I wish I’d been like you,” Claude said. “Free and easy. Just traveling around. I always had a job.”

He slid his eyes to me before turning them back to the road. The first twinge of discomfort — I’d gotten good at deciphering certain male expressions of desire. Clearing the throat, an assessing nip in the gaze.

“None of you people ever work, huh?” he said.

He was teasing, probably, but I couldn’t tell for sure. There was sourness in his tone, a sting of real resentment. Maybe I should have been frightened of him. This older man who saw that I was alone, who felt like I owed him something, which was the worst thing a man like that could feel. But I wasn’t afraid. I was protected, a hilarious and untouchable giddiness overtaking me. I was going back to the ranch. I would see Suzanne. Claude seemed barely real to me: a paper clown, innocuous and laughable.

—

“This good?” Claude said.

He’d pulled over near the campus in Berkeley, the clock tower and stair-step houses thickening the hills behind. He turned off the ignition. I felt the heat outside, the close wend of traffic.

“Thanks,” I said, gathering my purse and duffel.

“Slow down,” he said as I started to open the door. “Just sit with me a second, hm?”

I sighed but sat back in the seat. I could see the dry hills above Berkeley and remembered, with a start, that brief time in winter when the hills were green and plump and wet. I hadn’t even known Suzanne then. I could feel Claude looking at me sideways.

“Listen.” Claude scratched at his neck. “If you need some money—”

“I don’t need money.” I was unafraid, shrugging a quick goodbye and opening the door. “Thanks again,” I said. “For the ride.”

“Wait,” he said, grabbing my wrist.

“Fuck off,” I said, wrenching my arm away from the bracelet of his grasp, an unfamiliar heat in my voice. Before I slammed the door, I saw Claude’s weak and sputtering face. I was walking away, breathless. Almost laughing. The sidewalk radiating even heat, the pulse of the abrupt sunshine. I was buoyed by the exchange, as if suddenly allowed more space in the world.

“Bitch,” Claude called, but I didn’t turn back to look.

—

Telegraph was packed: people selling tables of incense or concho jewelry, leather purses hung from an alley fence. The city of Berkeley was redoing all the roads that summer, so piles of rubble collected on the sidewalks, trenches cracking through the asphalt like a disaster movie. A group in floor-length robes fluttered pamphlets at me. Boys with no shirts, their arms pressed with faint bruising, looked me up and down. Girls my age lugged carpetbags that banged against their knees, wearing velvet frock coats in the August heat.

Even after what had happened with Claude, I wasn’t afraid of hitchhiking. Claude was just a harmless floater in the corner of my vision, drifting peacefully into the void. Tom was the sixth person I approached, tapping his shoulder as he ducked into his car. He seemed flattered by my request for a ride, like it was an excuse I’d made up to be near him. He hurriedly brushed off the passenger seat, raining silent crumbs onto the carpet.

“It could be cleaner,” he said. Apologetic, as if I might possibly be picky.

—

Tom drove his small Japanese car at exactly the speed limit, looking over his shoulder before changing lanes. His plaid shirt was thinning at the elbows but clean and tucked, a boyishness to his slim wrists that moved me. He took me all the way to the ranch, though it was an hour from Berkeley. He’d claimed to be visiting friends at the junior college in Santa Rosa, but he was a bad liar: I could see his neck get pink. He was polite, a student at Berkeley. Premed, though he liked sociology, too, and history.

“LBJ,” he said. “Now there was a president.”

He had a large family, I learned, and a dog named Sister, and too much homework: he was in summer school, trying to get through prereqs. He’d asked me what my major was. His mistake excited me — he must have thought I was eighteen, at least.

“I don’t go to college,” I said. I was about to explain I was only in high school, but Tom immediately got defensive.

“I was thinking of doing that, too,” he said, “dropping out, but I’m gonna finish the summer classes. I already paid fees. I mean, I wish I hadn’t, but—” He trailed off. Gazing at me until I realized he wanted my forgiveness.

“That’s a bummer,” I said, and this seemed like enough.

He cleared his throat. “So do you have a job or something? If you’re not in school?” he said. “Gee, unless that’s a rude question. You don’t have to answer.”

I shrugged, affecting ease. Though maybe I was feeling easy on that car ride, like my occupation of the world could be seamless. These simple ways I could meet needs. Talking to strangers, dealing with situations.

“The place I’m going now — I’ve been staying there,” I said. “It’s a big group. We take care of each other.”

His eyes were on the road, but he was listening closely as I explained the ranch. The funny old house, the kids. The plumbing system Guy had rigged in the yard, a knotty mess of pipes.

“Sounds like the International House,” he said. “Where I live. There are fifteen of us. There’s a chore board in the hall, we all take turns with the bad ones.”

“Yeah, maybe,” I said, though I knew the ranch was nothing like the International House, the squinty philosophy majors arguing over who’d left the dinner dishes unwashed, a girl from Poland nibbling black bread and crying for a faraway boyfriend.

“Who owns the house?” he said. “Is it like a center or something?”

It was odd to explain Russell to someone, to remember that there were whole realms in which Russell or Suzanne did not figure.

“His album’s gonna come out around Christmas, probably,” I remember saying.

I kept talking about the ranch, about Russell. The way I tossed free Mitch’s name, like Donna had that day on the bus, with studied, careful deployment. The closer we got, the more worked up I became. Like horses that bolt with barn sickness, forgetting their rider.

“It sounds nice,” Tom said. I could tell my stories had charged him, a dreamy excitement in his features. Mesmerized by bedtime tales of other worlds.

“You could hang out for a while,” I said. “If you wanted.”

Tom brightened at the offer, gratitude making him shy. “Only if I’m not intruding,” he said, a blush clotting his cheeks.

—

I imagined Suzanne and the others would be happy with me for bringing this new person. Expanding the ranks, all the old tricks. A pie-faced admirer to raise his voice with ours and contribute to the food pool. But it was something else, too, that I wanted to extend: the taut and pleasant silence in the car, the stale heat raising vapors of leather. The warped image of myself in the side mirrors, so I caught only the quantity of hair, the freckled skin of my shoulder. I took on the shape of a girl. The car crossed the bridge, passing through the shit-stench veil of the landfill. I could see the span of another distant highway, sided by water, and the marshy flats before the sudden drop into the valley, the ranch hidden in its hills.

—

By that time, the ranch I’d known was a place that no longer existed. The end had already arrived: each interaction its own elegy. But there was too much hopeful momentum in me to notice. The leap in me when Tom’s car had first turned down the ranch drive: it had been two weeks, not long at all, but the return was overwhelming. And only when I saw everything still there, still alive and strange and half-dreamy as ever, did I understand I’d worried it might be gone. The things I loved, the miraculous house — like the one in Gone with the Wind, I’d realized, coming upon it again. The silty rectangle of pool, half-full, with its teem of algae and exposed concrete: it could all pass back into my possession.

As Tom and I walked from the car, I had a flash of hesitation, noticing how Tom’s jeans were too clean. Maybe the girls would tease him, maybe it had been a bad idea to invite him along. I told myself it would be fine. I watched him absorbing the scene — I read his expression as impressed, though he must have been noticing the disrepair, the junked-out skeletons of cars. The crispy package of a dead frog, drifting on the surface of the pool. But these were details that no longer seemed notable to me, like the sores on Nico’s legs that stuck with bits of gravel. My eyes were already habituated to the texture of decay, so I thought that I had passed back into the circle of light.

13

Donna stopped when she caught sight of us. A nest of laundry in her arms, smelling like the dusty air.

“Trou-ble,” she hooted. “Trouble,” a word from a long-forgotten world. “That lady just nabbed you, huh?” she said. “Man. Heavy.”

Dark circles made crescents under her eyes, a hollow sink to her features, though these details were overshadowed by the swell of familiarity. She seemed happy enough to see me, but when I introduced Tom, she zipped a look at me.

“He gave me a ride,” I supplied helpfully.

Donna’s smile teetered, and she hitched the laundry higher in her arms.

“Is it cool that I’m here?” Tom whispered to me, as if I had any power at all. The ranch had always welcomed visitors, putting them through their jokey gauntlet of attention, and I couldn’t imagine why that would have changed.

“Yeah,” I said, turning to Donna. “Right?”

“Well,” Donna said. “I don’t know. You should talk to Suzanne. Or Guy. Yeah.”

She giggled absently. She was being odd, though to me it was just the usual Donna rap — I could even feel affection for it. Some movement in the grass caught her attention: a lizard, scuttling in search of shade.

“Russell saw a mountain lion a few days ago,” she remarked to no one in particular. Widening her eyes. “Wild, huh?”

—

“Look who’s back,” Suzanne said, a flounce of anger in her greeting. Like I had disappeared on a little vacation. “Figured you’d forgotten how to get here.”

Even though she’d seen Mrs. Dutton stop me, she kept glancing at Tom like he was the reason I’d left. Poor Tom, who wandered the grassy yard with the hesitant shuffle of museumgoers. His nose pricking from the animal smells, the backed-up outhouse. Suzanne’s face was shuttered with the same distant confusion as Donna’s: they could no longer conceive of a world where you could be punished. I was suddenly guilty for the nights with Tamar, the whole afternoons when I didn’t even think of Suzanne. I tried to make my father’s apartment sound worse than it had been, as if I’d been watched at every moment, suffered through endless punishments.

“Jesus,” Suzanne snorted. “Dragsville.”

—

The shadow of the ranch house stretched along the grass like a strange outdoor room, and we occupied this blessing of shade, a line of mosquitoes hovering in the thin afternoon light. The air crackled with a carnival sheen — the familiar bodies of the girls jostling against mine, knocking me back into myself. The quick metal flash through the trees — Guy was bumping a car through the back ranch, calls echoing and disappearing. The drowsy shape of the children, mucking around a network of shallow puddles: someone had forgotten to turn off the hose. Helen had a blanket around herself, pulled up to her chin like a woolly ruff, and Donna kept trying to snap it away and expose the homecoming queen body underneath, the hematoma on Helen’s thigh. I was aware of Tom, sitting awkwardly in the dirt, but mostly I thrilled to Suzanne’s familiar shape beside me. She was talking quickly, a glaze of sweat on her face. Her dress was filthy, but her eyes were shining.

Tamar and my father weren’t even home yet, I realized, and how funny it was to already be at the ranch when they didn’t even know I was gone. Nico was riding a tricycle that was too small for him, the bike rusted and clanging as he pedaled hard.

“Cute kid,” Tom said. Donna and Helen laughed.

Tom wasn’t sure what he’d said that was funny, but he blinked like he was willing to learn. Suzanne plucked at a stalk of oat grass, sitting in an old winged chair pulled from the house. I was keeping an eye out for Russell but didn’t see him anywhere.

“He went to the city for a bit,” Suzanne said.

We both turned at the sound of screeching: it was just Donna, trying to do a handstand on the porch, the flail of her kicking feet. She’d knocked over Tom’s beer, though he was the one apologizing, looking around as if he’d find a mop.

“Jesus,” Suzanne said. “Relax.”

She wiped her sweating hands on her dress, her eyes pinging a little — speed made her stiff as a china cat. The high school girls used it to stay skinny, but I’d never done it: it seemed at odds with the droopy high I associated with the ranch. It made Suzanne harder to reach than usual, a change I didn’t want to acknowledge to myself. I assumed she was just angry. Her gaze never exactly focusing, stopping at the brink.

We were talking like we always did, passing a joint that made Tom cough, but I was noticing other things at the same time with a slight drift of unease — the ranch was less populated than before, no strangers milling around with empty plates, asking what time dinner would be ready. Shaking back their hair and invoking the long car ride to L.A. I didn’t see Caroline anywhere, either.

“She was weird,” Suzanne said when I asked about Caroline. “Like you could see her insides through her skin. She went home. Some people came and picked her up.”

“Her parents?” The thought seemed ludicrous, that anyone at the ranch even had parents.

“It’s cool,” Suzanne said. “A van was heading north, I think Mendocino or something. She knew them from somewhere.”

I tried to picture Caroline back at her parents’ house, wherever that was. I didn’t push much further than those thoughts, Caroline safe and elsewhere.

Tom was clearly uncomfortable. I was sure he was used to college girls with part-time jobs and library cards and split ends. Helen and Donna and Suzanne were raw, a sour note coming off them that struck me, too, returned from two weeks with miraculous plumbing and proximity to Tamar’s obsessive grooming, the special nylon brush she used only on her fingernails. I didn’t want to notice the hesitation in Tom, the shade of a cower whenever Donna addressed him directly.

“So what’s new with the record?” I asked loudly. Expecting the reassuring invocation of success to shore up Tom’s faith. Because it was still the ranch, and everything I’d said was true — he just had to open himself to it. But Suzanne gave me a strange look. The others watching for her to set a tone. Because it hadn’t gone well, that was the point of her stare.

“Mitch is a fucking traitor,” she said.

I was too shocked to fully take in the ugly cast of Suzanne’s hatred: how could Russell really not have gotten his deal? How could Mitch not have seen it on him, the aura of strange electricity, the air around him murmuring? Was it specific to this place, whatever power Russell had? But Suzanne’s gaudy anger recruited me back in, too.

“Mitch freaked, who knows why. He lied. These people,” Suzanne said. “These fucking dopes.”

“You can’t fuck with Russell,” Donna said, nodding along. “Saying one thing, then going back on it. Mitch doesn’t know how Russell is. Russell wouldn’t even have to lift a finger.”

Russell had slapped Helen, that time, like it was nothing. The uncomfortable rearranging I had to do, the mental squint in order to see things differently.

“But Mitch could change his mind, right?” I asked. When I finally looked toward Tom, he wasn’t paying attention, his gaze trained beyond the porch.

Suzanne shrugged. “I don’t know. He told Russell not to call him anymore.” She let out a snort. “Fuck him. Just disappearing like he didn’t make promises.”

I was thinking about Mitch. His desire, that night, making him brutish so he didn’t care when I winced, my hair caught under his arm. His fogged-over gaze that kept us indistinct, our bodies just the symbol of bodies.

“But it’s cool,” Suzanne said, forcing a smile. “It’s not—”

She was cut off by the sudden surprise of Tom, surging to his feet. He clattered down from the porch and sprinted in the direction of the pool. Shouting something I couldn’t make out. His shirt coming untucked, the naked, vulnerable holler.

“What’s his problem?” Suzanne said, and I didn’t know, flushing with desperate embarrassment that morphed into fear: Tom was still shouting, scrambling down the steps into the pool.

“The kid,” he said, “the boy.”

Nico: I flashed on the silent shape of his body in the water, his little lungs sloshing and full. The porch tilted. By the time we hurried over to the pool, Tom already slogging the kid out of the slimy water, it was immediately clear that he was okay. Everything was fine. Nico sat down on the grass, dripping, an aggrieved look on his face. Fisting at his eyes, pushing Tom away. He was crying more because of Tom than anything else, the strange man who’d yelled at him, who’d dragged him from the pool when he was just having fun.

“What’s the big idea?” Donna said to Tom. Patting Nico on the head roughly, like a good dog.

“He jumped in.” Tom’s panic was reverberating through his whole body, his pants and shirt sopping. The wet suck of his shoes.

“So?”

Tom was wide-eyed, not understanding that trying to explain would make it worse.

“I thought he’d fallen into the pool.”

“But there’s water in there,” Helen said.

“That wet stuff,” Donna said, sniggering.

“The kid’s fine,” Suzanne said. “You scared him.”

“Glug glug glug.” A fit of giggling overtook Helen. “You thought he was dead or something?”

“He still could have drowned,” Tom said, his voice going high. “No one was watching him. He’s too young to really swim.”

“Your face,” Donna said. “God, you’re all freaked, aren’t you?”

The sight of Tom wringing the biological stink of pool water from his shirt. The junk in the yard catching the light. Nico got to his feet, shaking out his hair. Sniffing a little with his weird childish dignity. The girls were laughing, all of them, so Nico trundled off easily, no one noticing his departure. And I pretended I hadn’t worried, either, that I’d known everything was fine, because Tom seemed pathetic, his panic right on the surface with no place to retreat, and even the kid was mad at him. I was ashamed for bringing him around, for how he’d caused such a fuss, and Suzanne was staring at me, so I knew exactly what a stupid idea it had been. Tom looked at me for help, but he saw the distance in my face, the way I slid my eyes back to the ground.

“I just think you should be careful,” Tom said.

Suzanne snorted. “We should be careful?”

“I was a lifeguard,” he said, his voice cracking. “People can drown even in shallow water.” But Suzanne wasn’t listening, making a face at Donna. Their shared disgust including me, I thought. I couldn’t bear it.

“Relax,” I said to Tom.

Tom looked wounded. “This is an awful place.”

“You should leave, then,” Suzanne said. “Doesn’t that sound like a good idea?” The rattle of speed in her, the vacant, vicious smile — she was being meaner than she needed to be.

“Can I talk to you for a second?” Tom said to me.

Suzanne laughed. “Oh, man. Here we go.”

“Just for a second,” he said.

When I hesitated, Suzanne sighed. “Go talk to him,” she said. “Christ.”

Tom walked away from the others and I followed him with halting steps, as if distance could prevent contagion. I kept glancing back to the group, the girls heading to the porch. I wanted to be among them. I was furious with Tom, his silly pants, his thatchy hair.

“What?” I said. Impatient, my lips tight.

“I don’t know,” Tom said, “I just think—” He hesitated, darting a look at the house, pulling at his shirt. “You can come back with me right now, if you want. There’s a party tonight,” he said. “At the International House.”

I could picture it. The Ritz crackers, earnest groups crammed around bowls of watery ice. Talking SDS and comparing reading lists. I half shrugged, the barest shift of a shoulder. He seemed to understand this gesture for the falsehood it was.

“Maybe I should write down my number for you,” Tom said. “It’s the hall phone, but you can just ask for me.”

I could hear the stark billow of Suzanne’s laughter carrying in the air.

“That’s okay,” I said. “There’s no phone here, anyway.”

“They aren’t nice,” Tom said, catching my eyes. He looked like a rural preacher after a baptism, the wet pants clinging to his legs, his earnest stare.

“What do you know?” I said, an alarming heat rising in my cheeks. “You don’t even know them.”

Tom made an abortive gesture with his hands. “It’s a trash heap,” he said, sputtering, “can’t you see that?”

He indicated the crumbling house, the tangle of overgrown vegetation. All the junked-out cars and oil drums and picnic blankets abandoned to the mold and the termites. I saw it all, but I didn’t absorb anything: I’d already hardened myself to him and there was nothing else to say.

—

Tom’s departure allowed the girls to deepen into their natures without the fracture of an outsider’s gaze. No more peaceful, sleepy chatter, no balmy stretches of easy silence.

“Where’s your special friend?” Suzanne said. “Your old pal?” Her hollow affect, her leg jiggling even though her expression was blank.

I tried to laugh like they did, but I didn’t know why I got unnerved at the thought of Tom returning to Berkeley. He was right about the junk in the yard, there was more of it, and maybe Nico really could have been hurt, and what then? I noticed all of them had gotten skinnier, not just Donna, a brittle quality to their hair, a dull drain behind the eyes. When they smiled, I glimpsed the coated tongues seen on the starving. Without consciously doing so, I pinned a lot of hope on Russell’s return. Wanting him to weigh down the flapping corners of my thoughts.

“Heartbreaker,” Russell catcalled when he caught sight of me. “You run off all the time,” he said, “and it breaks our hearts when you leave us behind.”

I tried to convince myself, seeing the familiarity of Russell’s face, that the ranch was the same, though when he hugged me, I saw something smeared at his jawline. It was his sideburns. They were not stippled, like hair, but flat. I looked closer. They were drawn on, I saw, with some kind of charcoal or eyeliner. The thought disturbed me; the perverseness, the fragility of the deception. Like a boy I’d known in Petaluma who shoplifted makeup to cover his pimples. Russell’s hand worked my neck, passing along a fritter of energy. I couldn’t tell if he was angry or not. And how immediately the group jolted to attention at his arrival, trooping in his wake like ragged ducklings. I tried to pull Suzanne aside, hook my arm through hers like the old days, but she just smiled, low burning and unfocused, and shook herself loose, intent on following Russell.

—

I learned that Russell had been harassing Mitch for the last few weeks. Showing up unannounced at his house. Sending Guy to knock over his trash cans, so Mitch came home to a lawn junked with flattened cereal boxes and shredded wax paper and tinfoil slick with food scraps. Mitch’s caretaker had seen Russell there, too, just once — Scotty told Mitch he’d seen some guy parked at the gate, just staring, and when Scotty had asked him to leave, Russell had smiled and told him he was the house’s previous owner. Russell had also shown up at the recording engineer’s house, trying to cadge the tapes from his session with Mitch. The man’s wife was home. Later she’d recall being irritated at the sound of the doorbell: their newborn was asleep in the back bedroom. When she opened the door, there was Russell in his grubby Wranglers, his squinty smile.

She’d heard stories of the session from her husband, so she knew who Russell was, but she wasn’t afraid. Not really. He was not a frightening man when first encountered, and when she told him her husband wasn’t home, Russell shrugged.

“I could just grab the tapes real quick,” he said, straining to look past her. “In and out, just like that.” That’s when she got a little uneasy. Plowing her feet deeper into her old slippers, the fussing of the baby drifting down the hall.

“He keeps all that at work,” she said, and Russell believed her.

The woman remembered she heard a noise in the yard later that night, a thrash in the roses, but when she looked out the window, she didn’t see anything except the pebbled driveway, the stubble of the moonlit lawn.

—

My first night back was nothing like the old nights. The old nights had been alive with a juvenile sweetness in our faces — I’d pet the dog, who’d nose around for love, give him a hearty scratch behind his ears, my coursing hand urging me into a happy rhythm. And there had been strange nights, too, when we’d all taken acid or Russell would have to get in some drunk motorcycle guy’s face, using all his flip-flop logic on him. But I had never felt scared. That night was different, by the ring of stones with the barest of fires going. No one paid any attention when the flames dissolved to nothing, everyone’s roiling energy directed at Russell, who moved like a rubber band about to snap.

“This right here,” Russell said. He was pacing, dinking out a quick song. “I just made it up and it’s already a hit.”

The guitar was out of tune, twanging flat notes — Russell didn’t seem to notice. His voice rushed and frantic.

“And here’s another one,” he said. He fussed with the tuning pegs before letting loose a jangle of strums. I tried to catch Suzanne’s eye, but she was trained on Russell. “This is the future of music,” he said over the din. “They think they know what’s good ’cause they got songs on the radio, but that’s not shit. They don’t have true love in their hearts.”

No one seemed to notice his words unraveling around the borders: they all echoed what he said, their mouths twisting in shared feeling. Russell was a genius, that’s what I’d told Tom — and I could picture how Tom’s face would have moved with pity if he were there to see Russell, and it made me hate Tom, because I could hear it, too, all the space in the songs for you to realize they were rough, not even rough, just bad: sentimental treacle, the words about love as blunt as a grade-schooler’s, a heart drawn by a chubby hand. Sunshine and flowers and smiles. But I could not fully admit it, even then. The way Suzanne’s face looked as she watched him — I wanted to be with her. I thought that loving someone acted as a kind of protective measure, like they’d understand the scale and intensity of your feelings and act accordingly. That seemed fair to me, as if fairness were a measure the universe cared anything about.

—

There were dreams I had sometimes, and I’d wake from the tail end assuming some image or fact to be true, carrying forward this assumption from the dreamworld into my waking life. And how jarring it would be to realize that I was not married, that I had not cracked the code to flight, and there would be a real sorrow.

The actual moment Russell told Suzanne to go to Mitch Lewis’s house and teach him a lesson — I kept thinking I had witnessed it: the black night, the cool flicking chirps of crickets, and all those spooky oaks. But of course I hadn’t. I’d read about it so much that I believed I could see it clearly, a scene in the exaggerated colors of a childhood memory.

I’d been waiting in Suzanne’s room at the time. Irritable, desperate for her return. I’d tried to talk to her at multiple points that night, tugging at her arm, tracking her gaze, but she kept brushing me off. “Later,” she said, and that was all it took for me to imagine her promise fulfilling itself in the darkness of her room. My chest tightened when I heard footsteps enter the room, mind swelling with the thought — Suzanne was here — but then I felt the soft glancing hit and my eyes flew open — it was just Donna. She’d thrown a pillow at me.

“Sleeping Beauty,” she said, sniggering.

I tried to settle back into pretty repose; the sheet overheated from the nervous shuffle of my body, ears suggestible for any sound of Suzanne’s return. But she didn’t come to the room that night. I waited as long as I could, alert to every creak and jar, before passing into the drowsy patchwork of unwilling sleep.

In fact, Suzanne had been with Russell. The air of his trailer probably going stuffy from their fucking, Russell unraveling his plan for Mitch, he and Suzanne staring up at the ceiling. I can imagine how he got right up to the edge before swerving around the details, so maybe Suzanne would start to think she’d had the same idea, that it was hers, too.

“My little hellhound,” he had cooed to her, his eyes pinwheeling from a mania that could be mistaken for love. It was strange to think Suzanne would be flattered in this moment, but certainly she was. His hand scratching her scalp, that same agitated pleasure men like to incite in dogs, and I can imagine how the pressure started to build, a desire to move along the larger rush.

“It should be big,” Russell had said. “Something they can’t ignore.” I see him twisting a lock of Suzanne’s hair around a finger and pulling, the barest tug so she wouldn’t know if the throb she felt was pain or pleasure.

The door he opened, urging Suzanne through.

—

Suzanne was distracted the whole next day. Going off by herself, face announcing her hurry, or having urgent, whispered conferences with Guy. I was jealous, desperate that I couldn’t compete with the fraction of her that was deeded to Russell. She’d folded herself up and I was a distant concern.

I nursed my own confusion, tending hopeful explanations, but when I smiled at her, she blinked with delayed recognition, like I was a stranger returning her forgotten pocketbook. I kept noticing a soldered look in her eyes, a grim inward turning. Later I’d understand this was preparation.

Dinner was some reheated beans that tasted of aluminum, the burned scrapings of the pot. Stale chocolate cake from the bakery with a hoary pack of frost. They wanted to eat indoors, so we sat on the splintered floor, plates crooked on our laps. Forcing a primitive caveman hunch — no one seemed to eat very much. Suzanne pressed a finger to the cake and watched it crumb. Their looks at one another across the room were bursting with suppressed hilarity, a surprise-party conspiracy. Donna handing Suzanne a rag with a significant air. I didn’t understand anything, a pitiful dislocation keeping me blind and eager.

I’d steeled myself to force a talk on Suzanne. But I looked up from the nasty slop of my plate and saw she was already getting to her feet, her movements informed by information invisible to me.

They were going somewhere, I realized when I caught up to her, following the play of her flashlight beam. The lurch, the gag of desperation: Suzanne was going to leave me behind.

“Let me come too,” I said. Trying to keep up, following the swift rupture she cut through the grass.

I couldn’t see Suzanne’s face. “Come where?” she said, her voice even.

“Wherever you’re going,” I said. “I know you’re going somewhere.”

The teasing lilt. “Russell didn’t ask you to go.”

“But I want to,” I said. “Please.”

Suzanne didn’t say yes, exactly. But she slowed enough so I could match her stride, a pace new to me, purposeful.

“You should change,” Suzanne said.

I looked down, trying to discern what had offended her: my cotton shirt, my long skirt.

“Into dark clothes,” she said.

14

The car ride was as slurred over and unbelievable as a long illness. Guy at the wheel, Helen and Donna beside him. Suzanne sat in the backseat, staring out the window, and I was right next to her. The night had dropped deep and dark, the car passing under the streetlights. Their sulfur glow gliding across Suzanne’s face, a stupor occupying the others. Sometimes it seemed like I never really left the car. That a version of me is always there.

Russell stayed at the ranch that night. Which didn’t even register with me as strange. Suzanne and the others were his familiars, loosed out into the world — it had always been that way. Guy like his second in a duel, Suzanne and Helen and Donna not hesitating. Roos was supposed to have gone, too, but she didn’t — she claimed, later, that she’d gotten a bad feeling and stayed behind, but I don’t know if that is true. Did Russell hold her back, sensing a stubborn virtue in her that might yoke her to the real world? Roos with Nico, a child of her own. Roos, who did become the main witness against the others, taking the stand in a white dress with her hair parted straight down the middle.

I don’t know if Suzanne told Russell I was coming — no one ever answered that question.

The car radio was on, playing the laughably foreign soundtrack to other people’s lives. Other people who were getting ready to sleep, mothers who were scraping the last shreds of chicken dinner into the garbage. Helen was jawing away about a whale beaching down in Pismo and did we think it was true that it was a sign a big earthquake was gonna happen? Getting up on her knees then, like the idea thrilled her.

“We’d have to go to the desert,” she said. No one was taking her bait: a hush had fallen over the car. Donna muttered something, and Helen set her jaw.

“Can you open the window?” Suzanne said.

“I’m cold,” Helen whined in her baby voice.

“Come on,” Suzanne said, pounding the back of the seat. “I’m fucking melting.”

Helen rolled the window down and the car filled with air, flavored with exhaust. The salt of the nearby ocean.

And there I was among them. Russell had changed, things had soured, but I was with Suzanne. Her presence corralled any stray worries. Like the child who believes that her mother’s bedtime vigil will ward off monsters. The child who cannot decipher that her mother might be frightened, too. The mother who understands she can do nothing for protection except offer up her own weak body in exchange.

—

Maybe some part of me had known where things were headed, a sunken glimmer in the murk: maybe I had a sense of the possible trajectory and went along anyway. Later that summer, and at various points throughout my life, I would sift through the grain of that night, feeling blindly.

All Suzanne said was that we were paying Mitch a visit. Her words were spiked with a cruelty I hadn’t heard before, but even so, this was the furthest my mind ranged: we were going to do what we’d done at the Dutton house. We’d perform an unsettling psychic interruption so Mitch would have to be afraid, just for a minute, would have to reorder the world anew. Good — Suzanne’s hatred for him allowed and inflamed my own. Mitch, with his fat, probing fingers, the halting, meaningless chatter he kept up while looking us over. As if his mundane words would fool us, keep us from noticing how his glance dripped with filth. I wanted him to feel weak. We would occupy Mitch’s house like tricky spirits from another realm.

Because I did feel that, it’s true. A sense that something united all of us in the car, the cool whiff of other worlds on our skin and hair. But I never thought, even once, that the other world might be death. I wouldn’t really believe it until the news gathered its stark momentum. After which, of course, the presence of death seemed to color everything, like an odorless mist that filled the car and pressed against the windows, a mist we inhaled and exhaled and that shaped every word we spoke.

—

We had not gone very far, maybe twenty minutes from the ranch, Guy easing the car along the tight dark curves of the hills, emerging into the long empty stretches of the flat land and picking up speed. The stands of eucalyptus we passed, the chill of fog beyond the window.

My alertness held everything in precise amber. The radio, the shuffle of bodies, Suzanne’s face in profile. This is what they had all the time, I imagined, this net of mutual presence like something too near to identify. Just a sense of being buoyed along the fraternal rush, the belonging.

Suzanne rested her hand on the seat between us. The familiar sight stirred me, remembering how she’d grabbed for me in Mitch’s bed. The spotty surface of her nails, brittle from poor diet.

I was sick with foolish hope, believing I would ever stay in the blessed space of her attention. I tried to reach for her hand. A tap of her palm, like I had a note to pass. Suzanne startled a little and jarred from a haze I had not noticed until it broke.

“What?” she snapped.

My face dropped all ability to costume itself. Suzanne must have seen the needy swarm of love. Must have taken the measure, like a stone dropped in a well — but there was no sound marking the end. Her eyes went dull.

“Stop the car,” Suzanne said.

Guy kept driving.

“Pull over,” Suzanne said. Guy glanced back at us, then pulled into the shoulder of the right lane.

“What’s the matter—,” I said, but Suzanne cut me off.

“Get out,” she said, opening the door. Moving too fast for me to stop her, the reel snapping ahead, the sound lagging behind.

“Come on,” I said, trying to sound bright with the joke. Suzanne was already out of the car, waiting for me to leave. She wasn’t joking.

“But there’s nothing here,” I said, circling a desperate look at the highway. Suzanne was shifting, impatient. I glanced to the others for help. Their faces were lit by the dome light, leaching their features so they seemed as cold and inhuman as bronze figures. Donna looked away, but Helen watched me with a medical curiosity. Guy shifted in the driver’s seat, adjusting the mirror. Helen said something under her breath — Donna shushed her.

“Suzanne,” I said, “please,” the powerless tilt in my voice.

She said nothing. When I finally shuffled along the seat and got out, Suzanne didn’t even hesitate. Ducking back inside the car and closing the door, the dome light snapping off and returning them to darkness.

And then they drove away.

I was alone, I understood, and even as I tended some naïve wish — they would return, it was only a joke, Suzanne would never leave me like that, not really — I knew that I had been tossed aside. I could only zoom away, to hover up somewhere by the tree line, looking down on a girl standing alone in the dark. Nobody I knew.

15

There were all kinds of rumors those first days. Howard Smith reported, erroneously, that Mitch Lewis had been killed, though this would be corrected more swiftly than the other rumors. David Brinkley reported six victims had been cut up and shot and left on the lawn. Then the number was amended to four people. Brinkley was the first to claim the presence of hoods and nooses and Satanic symbols, a confusion that started because of the heart on the wall of the living room. Drawn with the corner of a towel, soaked in the mother’s blood.

The mix-up made sense — of course they’d read a ghoulish meaning in the shape, assume some cryptic, doomy scrawl. It was easier to imagine it was the leftover of a black mass than believe the actual truth: it was just a heart, like any lovesick girl might doodle in a notebook.

—

A mile up the road, I came upon an exit and nearby Texaco station. I went in and out of the sulfur lights, the sound they made like bacon frying. I rocked on my toes, watching the road. When I finally gave up on anyone coming for me, I called my father’s number from the pay phone. Tamar answered. “It’s me,” I said.

“Evie,” she said. “Thank God. Where are you?” I could picture her twining the cord in the kitchen, gathering the loops. “I knew you’d call soon. I told your dad you would.”

I explained where I was. She must have heard the crack in my voice.

“I’ll leave now,” she said. “You stay right there.”

I sat on the curb to wait, leaning on my knees. The air was cool with the first news of autumn, and the constellation of brake lights was going along 101, the big trucks rearing as they picked up speed. I was reeling with excuses for Suzanne, some explanation for her behavior that would shake out. But there wasn’t anything but the awful, immediate knowledge — we had never been close. I had not meant anything.

I could sense curious eyes on me, the truckers who bought bags of sunflower seeds from the gas station and spit neat streams of tobacco on the ground. Their fatherly gaits and cowboy hats. I knew they were assessing the facts of my aloneness. My bare legs and long hair. My furious shock must have sent out some protective scrum, warning them off — they left me alone.

Finally I caught sight of a white Plymouth approaching. Tamar didn’t turn off the ignition. I got into the passenger side, gratitude for Tamar’s familiar face making me fumble. Her hair was wet. “I didn’t have time to dry it,” she said. The look she gave me was kind but mystified. I could tell she wanted to ask questions, but she must have known that I wouldn’t explain. The hidden world that adolescents inhabit, surfacing from time to time only when forced, training their parents to expect their absence. I was already disappeared.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “He didn’t tell your mom you took off. I told him that you’d show up and then she’d just be worried for no reason.”

Already my grief was doubling, absence my only context. Suzanne had left me, for good. A frictionless fall, the shock of missing a step. Tamar searched her purse with one hand until she found a small gold box, overlaid with pink stamped leather. Like a card case. There was a single joint inside, and she nodded to the glove compartment — I found a lighter.

“Don’t tell your dad?” She inhaled, eyes on the road. “He might ground me, too.”

—

Tamar was telling the truth: my father hadn’t called my mother, and though he was shaky with rage, he was sheepish, too, his daughter a pet he’d forgotten to feed.

“You could’ve been hurt,” he said, like an actor guessing at his lines.

Tamar calmly patted his back on her way to the kitchen, then poured herself a Coke. Leaving me with his hot, nervous breath, his blinky, frightened face. He regarded me across the living room, his upset trailing off. Everything that had happened — I was unafraid of this, my father’s neutered anger. What could he do to me? What could he take away?

And then I was back in my bland room in Palo Alto, the light from the lamp the featureless light of the business traveler.

—

The apartment was empty by the time I emerged the next morning, my father and Tamar already at work. One of them — probably Tamar — had left a fan going, and a fake-looking plant shivered in the wake of air. There was only a week before I had to leave for boarding school, and seven days seemed too long to be in my father’s apartment, seven dinners to soldier through, but, at the same time, unfairly brief — I wouldn’t have time for habits, for context. I just had to wait.

I turned on the television, the chatter a comforting soundtrack as I foraged in the kitchen. The box of Rice Krispies in the cabinet had a barest coating of cereal left: I ate it by the handful, then flattened the empty box. I poured a glass of iced tea, balanced a stack of crackers with the pleasing quantity and thickness of poker chips. I ferried the food to the couch. Before I could settle back, the screen stopped me.

The crowd of images, doubling and spreading.

The search for the perpetrator or perpetrators still unsuccessful. The newscaster said Mitch Lewis was not available for comment. The crackers crimped into shards by my wet hands.

—

Only after the trial did things come into focus, that night taking on the now familiar arc. Every detail and blip made public. There are times I try to guess what part I might have played. What amount would belong to me. It’s easiest to think I wouldn’t have done anything, like I would have stopped them, my presence the mooring that kept Suzanne in the human realm. That was the wish, the cogent parable. But there was another possibility that slouched along, insistent and unseen. The bogeyman under the bed, the snake at the bottom of the stairs: maybe I would have done something, too.

Maybe it would have been easy.

—

They’d gone straight to Mitch’s after leaving me by the side of the road. Another thirty minutes in the car, thirty minutes that were maybe energized by my dramatic dismissal, the consolidation of the group into the true pilgrims. Suzanne leaning on folded arms over the front seat, giving off an amphetamine fritz, that lucid surety. Guy turning off the highway and onto the two-lane road, crossing the lagoon. The low stucco motels by the off-ramp, the eucalyptus loomy and peppering the air. Helen claimed, in her court testimony, that this was the first moment she expressed reservations to the others. But I don’t believe it. If anyone was questioning themselves, it was all under the surface, a filmy bubble drifting and popping in their brains. Their doubt growing weak as the particulars of a dream grow weak. Helen realized she’d left her knife at home. Suzanne shouted at her, according to trial documents, but the group dismissed plans to go back for it. They were already coasting, in thrall to a bigger momentum.

—

They parked the Ford along the road, not even bothering to hide it. As they made their way to Mitch’s gate, their minds seemed to hover and settle on the same movements, like a single organism.

I can imagine that view. Mitch’s house, as seen from the gravel drive. The calm fill of the bay, the prow of the living room. It was familiar to them. The month they’d spent living with Mitch before I’d known them, running up delivery bills and catching molluscum from dank towels. But still. I think that night they might have been newly struck by the house, faceted and bright as rock candy. Its inhabitants already doomed, so doomed the group could feel an almost preemptive sorrow for them. For how completely helpless they were to larger movements, their lives already redundant, like a tape recorded over with static.

—

They’d expected to find Mitch. Everyone knows this part: how Mitch had been called to Los Angeles to work on a track he’d made for Stone Gods, the movie that was never released. He’d taken the last TWA flight of the night out of SFO, landing in Burbank, leaving his house in the hands of Scotty, who had cut the grass that morning but not yet cleaned the pool. Mitch’s old girlfriend calling in a favor, asking if she and Christopher could crash for two nights, just two nights.

Suzanne and the others had been surprised to find strangers in the house. No one they had ever met. And that could have been the abortive moment, a glance of agreement passing between them. The return to the car, their deflated silence. But they didn’t turn back. They did what Russell had told them to do.

Make a scene. Do something everyone would hear about.

—

The people in the main house were preparing to go to bed, Linda and her little boy. She’d made him spaghetti for dinner and had snuck a forkful from his bowl but not bothered to make anything for herself. They were sleeping in the guest bedroom — her quilted weekend bag leaking clothes on the floor. Christopher’s grimy stuffed lizard with its jet button eyes.

Scotty had invited his girlfriend, Gwen Sutherland, to listen to records and use Mitch’s hot tub while Mitch was away. She was twenty-three, a recent graduate of the College of Marin, and she’d met Scotty at a barbecue in Ross. Not particularly attractive, but Gwen was kind and friendly, the kind of girl that boys are forever asking to sew on buttons or trim their hair.

They had both had a few beers. Scotty smoked some weed, though Gwen had not. They passed the evening in the tiny caretaker’s cottage Scotty kept to military standards of cleanliness — the sheets on his futon tight with hospital corners.

—

Suzanne and the others came across Scotty first. Nodding off on the couch. Suzanne cleaved away to investigate the sound of Gwen in the bathroom, while Guy nodded at Helen and Donna to go search the main house. Guy nudged Scotty awake. He snorted, jolting back from a dream. Scotty didn’t have his glasses on — he’d rested them on his chest as he fell asleep — and he must have thought Guy was Mitch, returning early.

“Sorry,” Scotty said, thinking about the pool, “sorry.” Blindly tapping for his glasses.

Then Scotty fumbled them on and saw the knife smiling up from Guy’s hand.

—

Suzanne had gotten the girl from the bathroom. Gwen was bent over the sink, splashing water on her face. When Gwen straightened, she saw a shape in the corner of her eye.

“Hi,” Gwen said, her face dripping. She was a girl who had been well raised. Friendly, even when surprised.

Maybe Gwen thought it was a friend of Mitch’s or Scotty’s, though within seconds it must have been obvious that something was wrong. That the girl who smiled back (because Suzanne did, famously, smile back) had eyes like a brick wall.

—

Helen and Donna collected the woman and the boy in the main house. Linda was upset, her hand fluttering at her throat, but she went with them. Linda in her underpants, her big T-shirt — she must have thought that as long as she was quiet and polite, she’d be fine. Trying to reassure Christopher with her eyes. The chub of his hand in hers, his untrimmed fingernails. The boy didn’t cry until later; Donna said he seemed interested at first, like it was a game. Hide and go seek, red rover, red rover.

—

I try to imagine what Russell was doing while all this was happening. Maybe they’d made a fire at the ranch and Russell was playing guitar in its darty light. Or maybe he’d taken Roos or some other girl to his trailer, and maybe they were sharing a joint and watching the smoke drift and hover against the ceiling. The girl would have preened under his hand, his singular attention, though of course his mind would have been far away, in a house on Edgewater Road with the sea out the door. I can see his tricky shrug, the inward coiling of his eyes that made them polished and cold as doorknobs. “They wanted to do it,” he’d say later. Laughing in the judge’s face. Laughing so hard he was choking. “You think I made them do anything? You think these hands did a single thing?” The bailiff had to remove him from the courtroom, Russell was laughing so hard.

—

They brought everyone to the living room of the main house. Guy made them all sit on the big couch. The glances between the victims that did not know, yet, that they were victims.

“What are you gonna do to us?” Gwen kept asking.

Scotty rolled his eyes, miserable and sweating, and Gwen laughed — maybe she could see, suddenly, that Scotty could not protect her. That he was just a young man, his glasses fogged, his lips trembling, and that she was far from her own home.

She started to cry.

“Shut up,” Guy said, “Christ.”

Gwen tried to halt her sobs, shaking silently. Linda attempted to keep Christopher calm, even as the girls tied everyone up. Donna knotting a towel around Gwen’s hands. Linda squeezing Christopher one last time before Guy nudged them apart. Gwen sat on the couch with her skirt hitched up her legs, keening with abandon. The exposed skin of her thighs, her still wet face. Linda murmuring to Suzanne that they could have all the money that was in her purse, all of it, that if they just took her to the bank, she could get some more. Linda’s voice was a calm monotone, a shoring up of control, though of course she had none.

—

Scotty was the first. He’d struggled when Guy put a belt around his hands.

“Just a second,” Scotty said, “hey.” Bristling at the rough grasp.

And Guy lost it. Slamming the knife with such force that the handle had splintered in two. Scotty struggled but could only flop onto the floor, trying to roll over and protect his stomach. A bubble of blood appearing from his nose and mouth.

—

Gwen’s hands had been tied loosely — as soon as the blade sank into Scotty, she jerked free and ran out the front door. Screaming with a cartoon recklessness that sounded fake. She was almost to the gate when she tripped and fell on the lawn. Before she could get to her feet, Donna was already on her. Crawling over her back, stabbing until Gwen asked, politely, if she could die already.

—

They killed the mother and son last.

“Please,” Linda said. Plainly. Even then, I think, hoping for some reprieve. She was very beautiful and very young. She had a child.

“Please,” she said, “I can get you money.” But Suzanne didn’t want money. The amphetamines tightening her temples, an incantatory throb. The beautiful girl’s heart, motoring in her chest — the narcotic, desperate rev. How Linda must have believed, as beautiful people do, that there was a solution, that she would be saved. Helen held Linda down — her hands on Linda’s shoulders were tentative at first, like a bad dance partner, but then Suzanne snapped at Helen, impatient, and she pressed harder. Linda’s eyes closed because she knew what was coming.

—

Christopher had started to cry. Crouching behind the couch; no one had to hold him down. His underwear saturated with the bitter smell of urine. His cries were shaped by screams, an emptying out of all feeling. His mother on the carpet, no longer moving.

Suzanne squatted on the floor. Holding out her hands to him. “Come here,” she said. “Come on.”

This is the part that isn’t written about anywhere, but the part I imagine most.

How Suzanne’s hands must have already been sprayed with blood. The warm medical stink of the body on her clothes and hair. And I can picture it, because I knew every degree of her face. The calming mystic air on her, like she was moving through water.

“Come on,” she said one last time, and the boy inched toward her. Then he was in her lap, and she held him there, the knife like a gift she was giving him.

—

By the time the news report was finished, I was sitting down. The couch seemed sheared off from the rest of the apartment, occupying airless space. Images blistered and branched like nightmare vines. The indifferent sea beyond the house. The footage of policemen in shirtsleeves, stepping from Mitch’s front door. There was no reason for them to hurry, I saw — it was over. Nobody would be saved.

I understood this news was much bigger than me. That I was only taking in the first glancing flash. I careened toward an exit, a trick latch: maybe Suzanne had broken off from the group, maybe she wasn’t involved. But all these frantic wishes carried their own echoed response. Of course she had done it.

The possibilities washed past. Why Mitch hadn’t been home. How I could have intersected with what was coming. How I could have ignored all the warnings. My breath was squeezed from the effort of trying not to cry. I could imagine how impatient Suzanne would be with my upset. Her cool voice.

Why are you crying? she’d ask.

You didn’t even do anything.

—

It’s strange to imagine the stretch of time when the murders were unsolved. That the act ever existed separately from Suzanne and the others. But for the larger world, it did. They wouldn’t get caught for many months. The crime — so close to home, so vicious — sickened everyone with hysteria. Homes had been reshaped. Turned suddenly unsafe, familiarity flung back in their owners’ faces, as if taunting them — see, this is your living room, your kitchen, and see how little it helps, all that familiarity. See how little it means, at the end.

The news blared through dinner. I kept turning at a jump of motion in the corner of my eye, but it was just the stream of television or a headlight glinting past the apartment window. My father scratched his neck as we watched, the expression on his face unfamiliar to me — he was afraid. Tamar wouldn’t leave it alone.

“The kid,” she said. “It wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t kill the kid.”

I had a numb certainty they would see it on me. A rupture in my face, the silence obvious. But they didn’t. My father locked the apartment door, then checked again before he went to bed. I stayed awake, my hands limp and clammy in the lamplight. Was there the merest slip between the outcomes? If the bright faces of planets had orbited in another arrangement, or a different tide had eaten away at the shore that night — was that the membrane that separated the world where I had or had not done it? When I tried to sleep, the inward reel of violence made me open my eyes. And something else, too, chiding in the background — even then, I missed her.

—

The logic of the killings was too oblique to unravel, involving too many facets, too many false clues. All the police had were the bodies, the scattered scenes of death like note cards out of order. Was it random? Was Mitch the target? Or Linda, or Scotty, or even Gwen? Mitch knew so many people, had a celebrity’s assortment of enemies and resentful friends. Russell’s name was brought up, by Mitch and by others, but it was one of many. By the time the police finally checked out the ranch, the group had already abandoned the house, taking the bus to campgrounds up and down the coast, hiding out in the desert.

I didn’t know how stalled the investigation was, how the police got caught up following trivia — a key fob on the lawn that ended up belonging to a housekeeper, Mitch’s old manager under surveillance. Death imbued the insignificant with forced primacy, its scrambled light turning everything into evidence. I knew what had happened, so it seemed the police must know, too, and I waited for Suzanne’s arrest, the day the police would come looking for me — because I’d left my duffel behind. Because that Berkeley student Tom would put together the murders and Suzanne’s hissing talk of Mitch and contact the police. My fear was real, but it was unfounded — Tom knew only my first name. Maybe he did speak to the police, good citizen that he was, but nothing came of it — they were inundated with calls and letters, all kinds of people claiming responsibility or some private knowledge. My duffel was just an ordinary duffel, and it had no identifying feature. The things inside: clothes, a book about the Green Knight. My tube of Merle Norman. The possessions of a child pretending at an adult’s accrual. And of course the girls probably had gone through it, tossing the useless book, keeping the clothes.

I had told many lies, but this one colonized a bigger silence. I thought of telling Tamar. Telling my father. But then I’d picture Suzanne, imagine her picking at a fingernail, the sudden cut of her gaze turning to me. I didn’t say anything to anyone.

—

The fear that followed the wake of the murders is not hard to call up. I was barely alone the week before boarding school, trailing Tamar and my father from room to room, glancing out windows for the black bus. Awake all night, as if my labored vigil would protect us, my hours of suffering a one-to-one offering. It seemed unbelievable that Tamar or my father didn’t notice how pale I was, how suddenly desperate for their company. They expected life would march on. Things had to be done, and I got shunted along their logistics with the numbness that had taken the place of whatever had made me Evie. My love of cinnamon hard candies, what I dreamed — that had all been exchanged for this new self, the changeling who nodded when spoken to and rinsed and dried the dinner plates, hands reddening in the hot water.

I had to pack up my room at my mother’s house before I went to boarding school. My mother had ordered me the Catalina uniform — I found two navy skirts and a middy blouse folded on my bed, the fabric stinking of industrial cleaner, like rental tablecloths. I didn’t bother to try on the clothes, shoving them into a suitcase on top of tennis shoes. I didn’t know what else to pack, and it didn’t seem to matter. I stared at the room in a trance. All my once beloved things — a vinyl diary, a birthstone charm, a book of pencil drawings — seemed valueless and defunct, drained of an animating force. It was impossible to picture what type of girl would ever have liked those things. Ever worn a charm around her wrist or written accounts of her day.

“You need a bigger suitcase?” my mother said from my doorway, startling me. Her face looked rumpled, and I could smell how much she’d been smoking. “You can take my red one, if you want.”

I thought that she’d notice the change in me even if Tamar or my father couldn’t. The baby fat in my face disappeared, a hard scrape to my features. But she hadn’t mentioned anything.

“This is fine,” I said.

My mother paused, surveying my room. The mostly empty suitcase. “The uniform fits?” she asked.

I hadn’t even tried it on, but I nodded, wrung into a new acquiescence.

“Good, good.” When she smiled, her lips cracked and I was suddenly overcome.

—

I was shoving books into the closet when I found two milky Polaroids, hidden under a stack of old magazines. The sudden presence of Suzanne in my room: her hot feral smile, the pudge of her breasts. I could call up disgust for her, hopped up on Dexedrine and sweating from the effort of butchery, and at the same time be pulled in by a helpless drift — here was Suzanne. I should get rid of the photo, I knew, the image already charged with the guilty air of evidence. But I couldn’t. I turned the picture over, burying it in a book I’d never read again. The second photo was of the smeary back of someone’s head, turning away, and I stared at the image for a long moment before I realized the person was me.