The Harder They Come

15

“DOESN’T HE SCARE YOU?”

She was in the kitchen of the house on the banks of the Noyo, a weak sun sifting through the trees, and Christabel, who didn’t even know him and who was probably jealous — definitely jealous — had called to see how she was getting along in exile.

“No,” she said, “not at all.” And that was the truth. Adam could be as strange as strange got, no doubt about that, but what Christabel didn’t understand was that underneath there was an essential sweetness to him, a boyishness, an innocence you didn’t find in the types that took up space in the bars and stomped up and down the aisles of the hardware store with the oh-so-pleased-with-themselves smirks on their faces, which, sadly, seemed to be the only types available to women like her and Christabel. Plus, he was young. And handsome. A whole lot handsomer than her ex, Roger, who’d let himself go till he wasn’t much more than a belly with pants on it — or anybody she’d dated since. And built. She told Christabel that, as if she needed any justification, because who she dated was nobody’s business but hers, not even her best friend’s.

“He’s like a rock. I don’t know what he does — I don’t see him lifting weights or anything — but he’s hard all over.”

“Don’t get dirty on me now.”

She laughed. “I’m not. Really, I’m not. Just stating the facts.”

There was a long exhalation on the other end of the line, Christabel blowing out the smoke of her cigarette, and she could picture it, the way she threw her head back and pursed her lips as if she were channeling the smoke through an imaginary portal in the sky and sending it right on up to heaven, to God Himself, who, after all, was the one who invented nicotine. “You’re just a cougar, that’s all.”

She didn’t deny it. In fact, it brought a smile to her lips. “Who me?” she said, and they both laughed. Then she said, “I thought you gave up smoking?”

“I did.”

“So what’s that puffing I hear?”

“Just having a little taste to see what I’m missing. Isn’t that what you’re doing — with Adam? Because don’t tell me you’re serious—”

It had been a week since she’d moved in and if he hadn’t been around much, that was all right. He was mysterious, always out in the woods, and when he wasn’t he was lying supine on the couch in a clutter of books and notepads or just staring into the gray void of the TV, which looked as if it hadn’t worked in years. If he had anything to say at all it was about Colter — Colter this and Colter that, the same story, over and over. And the cops, the cops really lit him up. Ditto the Chinese. Colter, the cops and the Chinese, those were his themes. When he was talking, that is, which wasn’t much. He disappeared early each morning, before she was up, but he was always there for dinner and always glad to see the food dished out on the plate, whether it was meat loaf or mac and cheese or bean burritos. Glad for the sex too. She’d never known anybody like him — it was as if he’d been locked up in a cage his whole life. He wanted it. He needed it. He was hungry for it. And so was she. She’d been abstinent so long she’d forgotten what it was like to have your blood quicken just thinking about somebody, to feast on the smell of him, to find yourself getting wet even before he had his clothes off, even before he touched you.

“You want to meet him? See for yourself?” A pause. “He’s sweet. He really is.”

Christabel said something back, but it was garbled, hampered by the connection, the signal weak out here in the woods, and there was no landline — Adam had ripped it out. And why? He claimed the phone had been listening to him, spying on him, and if she doubted that — CIA, FBI, his mother, the Chinese — she couldn’t fault his paranoia. Or was it even paranoia — or just wariness, just being hip to reality? They were listening in on everybody and tracking their e-mails too, and that was a fact.

“You’re breaking up,” she said. “It’s me. Wait a minute”—and she stepped out the back door—“is this better?”

“I said, after what you’ve been telling me, he sounds pretty strange. Even if he is a stud.”

“What’s strange? Everybody’s strange. You’re strange. I’m strange.”

“You can say that again.”

“No, seriously, you want to come for dinner?”

“When?”

“I don’t know, tonight?” It was a Saturday, the day they usually got together for dinner someplace and then the whole hopeless charade of bar-hopping, singles night out, as if there’d be any male in any of those places who would be of interest to either of them, every last one too old, too young, too stupid or too married.

“Come early. We’ll have cocktails. Four-thirty? Four, even?”

A silence, as if Christabel were weighing all the stacked-up options of her glittering social life, and then she said, “I don’t even know how to get there, like what road, it’s not even marked, right? And that’s another thing — it’s just crazy what you’re doing. You can’t hide out forever—”

“A week isn’t forever.”

“What then — you going to stay the full thirty days till the dog’s out of quarantine? You think that’s going to satisfy them? You can’t just — why don’t you at least take him to the vet and have the vet give him a shot or some kind of certificate or something?”

It was as if somebody had laid a cold hand on her back — or no, an ice pack. All her fear and hate gusted through her like an Arctic wind and froze her right there in place, her boots stuck fast in the dirt, her frame as rigid as the cinder-block wall and the trees that stood motionless all around her. Christabel was right: she couldn’t stay here forever, plus Sten was closing on the place and there’d be a new owner soon. And where did that leave her? She couldn’t go back to her own house because they’d be looking for her there, at least till the quarantine was up, and Christabel’s apartment was the size of your average cell at the House of Detention and she wouldn’t have her anyway because she couldn’t risk harboring a fugitive. And that was just how she’d put it, Christabel, the coward, the wuss: harboring a fugitive. Bow down and kiss their asses, why don’t you? I could lose my job, she’d said.

The fact was, Sara had already taken the dog to the vet and already mailed the proof of rabies/parvo vaccination to the court, knowing it most likely wouldn’t fly since Kutya had bitten the cop before he was vaccinated. But it was better than nothing. At least she was trying, though they had no right in any of this except the right of might, the right of their fraudulent and blatantly unconstitutional laws and their storm troopers in the shiny taxpayer-bought cars. And the judges and the courts and the DMV and all the rest of the parasitic bureaucracy they’d imposed on the American public. It was a house of cards just waiting for somebody to blow it all away. The leeches. The bloodsuckers.

“I already did,” she said. “But I’m not going to stand around and wait for some dickhead in a patrol car to pull into the driveway with a warrant, I’m not that stupid. And I’ll tell you another thing: I blew off the court appearance too.”

“Great. That’s just fucking brilliant. What do you want to do, go to jail?”

No, she didn’t want to go to jail, but there was no way she was going to bow down to them because that would just make her a slave like everybody else. In three weeks she’d go back to the vet and have him certify that the dog didn’t have rabies, not then or ever, and if they still wanted to come after her for a bogus misdemeanor charge of obstructing police operations (!!!), well she’d take that risk. And bet anything — bet anybody — they’d forget all about it. Really, even in their puffed-up sick little world they must have had better things to do than harass somebody over a dog and a seatbelt. Like catch a couple serial killers or rapists maybe, wouldn’t that be a start?

“Whatever,” she said. The sun was warm on her shoulders, already defrosting her. Birds sang in the trees. It was a beautiful day, a glorious day, and here came Kutya around the corner of the house to rub up against her leg and sit at her feet in a cascade of hair. Chicken cordon bleu, that was what she was thinking, the classiest thing she knew how to make, because this was an occasion, or it was going to be, and she wasn’t cowed or bowed or stranded like some refugee floating on a raft, and Christabel was going to see that and appreciate it and they were going to party on down as if she didn’t have a care in the world. “Christabel? You there?”

Another long exhalation, pfffhhhh. “Uh-huh.”

“Listen,” she said, “let me tell you how to get here. .”

Then she was in the kitchen, cleaning up after breakfast. She’d made eggs over easy and Canadian bacon with fried tomatoes on sourdough toast, enough for two (cooking for two already a habit, after all these years of cooking for one, one only), even though Adam wasn’t there to share the meal. She’d wakened at first light to the gentle release of the bedsprings and there he was, naked and slipping into his camouflage pants, in too much of a hurry to bother with underwear. Or too manly. Or juvenile or whatever. He didn’t look at her, didn’t even glance in her direction. Thirty seconds was all it took to lace up his boots, throw on a shirt and disappear into the bathroom, where she heard the buzz of his electric razor. She’d watched him shaving two mornings ago just for the thrill of it — her man, hard as rock, shaving his chin, his cheeks, circling the taut slash of his mouth, then running the razor up over his skull and down the back of his neck, thirty seconds more, and he never once looked at himself in the mirror. And why was that? Mirrors spooked him, or so he’d told her over their third glass of wine at dinner that night. “Why?” she’d asked. He’d just turned away and in that soft breath of a voice said, “I don’t like what I see in there.”

This morning she’d got out of bed while he was in the bathroom, throwing on a terrycloth robe his grandmother had left behind, and followed him into the living room. “You going out in the woods?” she asked, though she already knew the answer — and knew too not to pry. He had something out there, a bunker, a fortress — it could have been a treehouse, for all he let on — and it occupied him all day every day. Or maybe he was hiking. Maybe that was it. Whatever it was, it sure kept him in shape.

He didn’t answer. Didn’t even bother to nod. It was morning and in the morning he didn’t have much to say. They were close at night, in the dark, very close, but what they were doing together didn’t need words. When he’d been drinking, which was a pretty regular thing — daily, that is, and she joined him because why not? — he’d open up to her as much as he was capable of. He wasn’t a talker. That was all right with her. She could talk for two.

“You want me to make you a sandwich?”

Still nothing. He just slipped on his backpack, took up his rifle and slung it over one shoulder. She noticed he was wearing the knife he’d got at Big 5, the sheath looped over his belt at hip level. And he had his canteen, of course, dangling from the pack, and whether it contained 151 or water she couldn’t say. His boots shone — he polished them every night, the sound of the rag snapping back and forth the last thing she heard before he came to bed. Everything about him seemed to gleam in the light, from the boots right on up to the barrel of the rifle. For her part, she didn’t know one rifle from another — guns didn’t interest her — but this one was some sort of military thing with a clip on it. “What’s with the gun?” she asked. “You going hunting?” And then she tried to make a joke of it: “Bring me back a couple of squirrels. I make a mean squirrel stew.”

He’d glanced up at her then, as if seeing her for the first time. His eyes were clear, a bright transparent blue that went so deep she could have been looking into the ocean and seeing no bottom to it at all. “For protection,” he said.

“From what?” And she couldn’t help herself: “Cougars?”

If he heard her, if he recognized she was making a joke, he never let on. “People,” he said, “motherfuckers, creeps, assholes. Cougars eat deer, people eat everything.”

“And they’re not going to eat you?”

He gave her a smile then — his version of a smile, anyway, the corners of his mouth lifting ever so subtly in acknowledgment — and started out the door, ducking his left shoulder automatically so as not to strike the lintel with the muzzle of his rifle. She wanted to call out to ask him if she should expect him for dinner, but checked herself — she wasn’t his mother. She wasn’t a nag either. And what he did, for as long as he was going to do it, didn’t matter to her. This was temporary. It was a week. Maybe it would go three weeks more. Or maybe. . but she didn’t want to think beyond that.

She went to the door and watched him stride to the cement-block wall and go up and over it as if it were nothing. Like Jackie Chan. Or the new James Bond, whatever his name was. And what was that martial arts thing called, where you just run right up a wall? Parkour. Adam was a master of that. Of course, he could have just strolled through the doorway his father had made, but he refused to — he wouldn’t acknowledge it, didn’t even seem to see it. If it was up to him he’d seal it up again, she knew that, but then it would be pretty inconvenient for her when she wanted to haul in a load of groceries or take the dog out for a walk, and what was she going to do, use the stepladder? Plus, how could you sell a house with no way in? And Sten intended to sell it, no matter how his son felt about it, and he’d taken her aside and told her as much. The house was in escrow and he didn’t want anything screwing up the deal — the buyer was a friend of his and Carolee’s who was taking the place as is, grandmother’s furniture and all, and he’d agreed to let Adam stay on till the end of the month. Her guess was that they needed the money to pay down the mortgage on the new place in Mendocino, which had ocean views, and ocean views were anything but cheap.

Crossing the yard herself now, Kutya trotting along behind to pause and pee and sniff at her ankles, she came through the doorway just in time to see Adam heading down the slope to the river. The sun glinted off his shaved head and sparked at the muzzle of the rifle, and then he was in the shadow of the trees and she lost him a moment before he reappeared on a bend in the path, moving fast, double time, always double time, as if somebody — or something — was after him.

She’d just got done with the dishes when her phone rang. Without thinking, she hit “talk” and put it to her ear. “Sara here,” she said, figuring it was one of her clients — or maybe somebody new. She was in the Yellow Pages, both in the phonebook and online, and she could never have too much work. The money was good and she worked hard for it, which was why she was never going to give another nickel to the feds, or what — the Franchise Tax Board, and what a joke that was.

“Sara?” The voice was a man’s, deep, a froggy baritone.

“Yes?”

“Sara Hovarty Jennings?”

It was right about then that she began to regret having answered, because what client — or potential client — would ask for her by her full name? “Yeah,” she said, and all the brass had gone out of her voice. “Who’s this?”

“This is Sergeant Brawley of the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Department.” A pause to let that sink in. “And I’m calling to urge you to come in voluntarily to the Ukiah station and surrender your dog”—the rattle of a keyboard—“Kutya. Is that right? Kutya, isn’t it?”

Stupidly, she said, “Yes.”

“Let me apprise you that there is a warrant out for your arrest — for failure to appear — and that we have video evidence showing that you entered Animal Control with an accomplice at 2:35 p.m. on Saturday, August 10, and illegally removed your dog from quarantine. What do you have to say to that?”

“I’m quarantining him myself,” she said, feeling up against it now, more angry than scared.

Another pause. More rattling. “And where might that be?”

“I mailed a certificate of rabies vaccination to the court — what more do you want from me, blood?”

The voice, which had been deep, calm and blandly officious to this point, rose in pitch — and color, color too, as if any of this mattered to him, as if it was anything more than some idiotic imposture: “We want, or no, we require you to surrender your person and your animal immediately on penalty of—”

That was all she heard, because in the next moment she had the phone down on the kitchen floor and was grinding it underfoot — they could track you, track you anywhere, the phone like a homing device, like your own little flag of surrender. For a moment she was too angry to think, and if she just kept grinding the phone under her heel and if the plastic frame of it was gouging the linoleum floor Adam’s grandmother had kept up through all her failing years, well, she would worry about that later. At the moment, she couldn’t seem to catch her breath, she was so upset. She kept telling herself to calm down even as the dog, with his dog’s radar, sensed that something was amiss and began to whine, his nails tapping out an elaborate distress signal on the slick linoleum.

As soon as she’d had a chance to catch her breath she began to rethink things. Already she regretted smashing the phone. Yes, the number had been compromised, no doubt about that — obviously the police had hacked the phone records to get her cell number, but without a phone how would her clients reach her? How would she schedule appointments? How would she live? Even now people could be calling her — or the home phone, where they’d just get a message. Which she couldn’t receive and couldn’t answer. And if she didn’t call back, they’d just go to somebody else, and there went her business. She looked down at her hands and saw they were shaking.

She needed to go to the market for groceries — and to stop in at Radio Shack for a new phone, one of those cheap disposable things that came with a prepaid card. But she was in no condition to drive, not now. So she did the only thing she could think to do: clean. Cleaning always calmed her, the Zen of it, the mindlessness, take up a sponge and some Ajax and go deep. For the next two hours she did nothing but sweep, scrub and polish, rechanneling her energy into something productive. She wasn’t going to let them get to her, she was determined about that. Christabel was coming over for a nice dinner and they were going to celebrate, the United States Illegitimate Government of America be damned. She took out the trash and carried the recycling to the car. Retrieved the mop and cleaned and waxed the linoleum in the kitchen, though she’d just done it the day before, then soaked a sponge in bleach and ran it over the grout around the sink by way of eradicating the ugly black tendrils of mold there, working an old toothbrush over the problem spots till they disappeared. Next, she proceeded to the living room, where she took up the oriental rug and carried it outside to air it, flinging it high to drape over the wall, then went back in to sweep and wax the oak floor before turning to the bedrooms.

The house had two: the late grandmother’s, which was fussy and cluttered with keepsakes and bric-a-brac, the walls hung with corny pictures of anthropomorphized chicks and puppies and kittens, and Adam’s, which was where they’d been sleeping. His room was Spartan, nothing but the essentials, though she did find his bong, a couple of rolled-up Bob Marley and the Wailers posters and a handful of tie-dyed T-shirts tucked away in the back of his closet, along with a cardboard box of old video games and action movies. Typical stuff. Boys’ stuff. It made her smile. And that smile broke the spell. They couldn’t trace her — she could have answered that phone anywhere, could have been on a job, cruising along in her car, roaming the aisles of the food store, how would they know? Sergeant What’s-His-Face probably had a list of sixty people to call — and harass — and it was nothing to her. They’d never find her. The tools. The corporate tools of the U.S.I.G.A. who couldn’t begin to comprehend anything other than what their bosses dictated to them, and wasn’t that the way the Fascists took hold and the Communists too? Through ignorance and propaganda? Just keep the people in the dark and whatever you do don’t let them read the Constitution.

She swept the bedroom, taking her time, then she vacuumed for good measure and made up the bed with fresh sheets, and then — once she felt calm again, as calm and unruffled as if she were at the tiller of a sloop cutting across a spanking sun-drenched bay — she put the dog in the car and drove on into Fort Bragg, to the cheap market there, the one the tourists didn’t know about, to pick up the boneless chicken breast and the ham and Gruyère and seasoned bread crumbs for the cordon bleu, as well as asparagus, new potatoes and two bottles of wine for her and Christabel and a six-pack of Old Stock Ale, 11.9 % ABV, for Adam, after which she stopped in at Radio Shack to get herself a new phone.

She had everything ready by four, the table set, the cordon bleu and potatoes ready to slip into the oven, the asparagus rinsed, drizzled in oil and laid out on a separate pan and the first bottle of wine (a mid-range California red, on special, but a step up from Two-Buck Chuck and certainly drinkable, especially after it sat out for a while) opened and decanted to give it some air. Adam wasn’t back yet, but he generally turned up around cocktail hour, looking to get a buzz on. She’d got into the habit of putting out potato chips or crackers and cheese or mixed nuts or something, he was that hungry, as if he hadn’t eaten all day — and maybe he hadn’t, unless he was eating the freeze-dried meals he’d got such a deal on at the Big 5. She fed Kutya so he wouldn’t be begging at the table and she’d just sat down with the three-by-five card she kept in her wallet to put some of her clients’ numbers into the new phone when she heard the sound of a car coming up the road. Expecting Christabel, she rose with a smile, tucked the phone away in the front pocket of her jeans and went out the door, across the yard and through the gap in the wall, Kutya at her heels.

But this wasn’t Christabel’s pickup rolling to a stop out front, but a Prius, a silver Prius, and for a moment she drew a blank. Then she recognized Sten’s face there behind the windshield and understood. He’d come to hang the metal door that had been sitting there all week, that was what she was thinking, but then she saw that his wife was with him — Carolee, whom she’d never met, or not formally — and began wondering if she’d have enough for two more people, and beyond that how all this was going to go down with Adam. And Christabel. Because Christabel was expecting a party, just the three of them, that was the whole point. But the doors flung open, slammed, and there they were, Kutya circling round them and barking as if they were intruders, which, in a way, they were. “No, Kutya,” she called. “No bark. Get down now.”

Carolee wore a puzzled expression — or inquisitive, maybe that was a better word — and she didn’t even seem to notice the dog, just fastened her eyes on Sara’s and tried to simulate a smile to cover herself. It was a motherly smile because she was a mother, in her sixties — Adam’s mother — though she looked younger, what with her blond hair, worn long and parted so it fell across her face. She was wearing dressy sandals, white shorts and a pink blouse with plenty of room in it. Compared with her husband she was almost a dwarf, three or four inches shorter than Sara herself, and here she came, still ignoring the dog, right on up to her to extend her hand, squint into her face and say, “You must be Sara.”

Well, yes, she was Sara, and she didn’t like the scrutiny she was getting here, wondering in that moment just exactly what Sten had told her, not to mention Cindy Burnside and whoever else. She held it all in, taking the limp hand in hers before exchanging a quick look with Sten to gauge his reaction before saying, “Nice to meet you.” And then, in extenuation — of what, she wasn’t sure: moving in with their son, occupying a house that was in escrow, having a barky unkempt Rasta dog, being alive and drawing breath — she added, “I was just cooking.”

Carolee dropped her hand and let her smile fade and come back again, as if it were battery-operated. “Nice to meet you too,” she said, and now she looked to Sten, “—finally.” The dog was sniffing at her bare legs, her toenails newly done, in a shade of red just this side of orange, and she turned back round to ask, “Is Adam here?”

“No, he’s out,” Sara said, and she should have left it there, but didn’t. “In the woods?” She shrugged, let her eyes fly up, her smile complicit. “You know Adam.”

Carolee wouldn’t give an inch. She just stood there staring into her eyes, cold as anything. “Yes, I know Adam,” she said, and the way she said it was like a sword that plunged right in and worked its way out the other side. “He is my son, after all.”

Check, she was thinking, and she was staring right back and just as hard. You’re the mother and I’m nothing, just some random fuck, isn’t that it? She almost said something else she would have regretted — this woman was a friend of Cindy Burnside, after all, and she could spread her poison far and wide and no doubting it — but instead dropped her eyes. “Listen, I’ve got plenty — I mean, I was expecting a friend, and Adam, of course — and if you want to stay for dinner that would be great, I mean, we’d be honored. .”

“Sounds good,” Sten said, “but we really just stopped by for a couple minutes. I was thinking I’d hang that door and Carolee wanted to go through some of her mother’s things—”

Without another word, without even bothering to glance at her or even pretend she’d picked up on the invitation, Carolee just brushed right by her, passed through the gap in the wall and went on across the yard and into the house to leave her standing there with Sten, who looked — what was it? — pained. The sun glinted in his hair. He was wearing Ray-Bans, so she couldn’t see his eyes, but the rest of his face seemed to shrink away, the Amazing Shrinking Man, now you see him, now you don’t. This was hard for him. It was hard for her too.

“Really,” she said, “I’m making chicken cordon bleu — it’d be no trouble.”

“No,” he said, letting one hand rise and fall, “we can’t stay. I brought a couple of boxes—” And here he stepped over to the car, flipped open the rear hatch and raised them in evidence, eight or ten new cardboard boxes, folded flat. “Most of the junk’s going into the dumpster, but there are things she’s sentimental about, though Christ knows where we’re going to put it all.” He let out a laugh. “You’re supposed to be scaling down at my age.”

“Yeah,” she said, nodding, as if she could know. “But how about a drink? You’ll have a drink at least?” She smiled. “I’ve got wine open. And I make a killer margarita.”

For the next half hour she tried to stay out of the way as Carolee stomped in and out of the house clutching boxes stuffed with odds and ends and Sten tinkered with the door to get it flush, looking in odd moments like Adam, but she didn’t want to go there. Like father, like son. Though she couldn’t feature Adam hanging a door or changing a washer or anything like that. He was more the outdoors type, and here it came to her with the force of revelation: more the horticultural type, more the grower, the pot farmer, and why else would he be so secretive out there in the woods all day every day? She tried to picture it, the spiky-leafed plants, a whole field of them nodding in a gentle breeze and Adam hauling water up from some creek, working his muscles under the blaze of the sun. It was time he let her in on the secret. Time he trusted her. And showed it.

Then the door was hung and Sten had a margarita in his hand, which Carolee, looking daggers, had refused, and she had no choice but to put the potatoes in to bake though she wished they would just leave before Christabel showed. Or Adam. Adam could waltz in any minute now — it was close to five and his internal clock would be ticking — and who knew what kind of reaction he was going to have? As like as not, he’d just jump right back over the wall and disappear. Like at the pizza place. They were having a nice discussion, even if Adam was a bit rocked on that ale and the hits of rum he kept sneaking from the canteen, and she was explaining Redemption Theory to him, how Roger Elvick had uncovered the whole fraud the government was perpetuating by issuing birth certificates so they could use every baby born as collateral for the loans the Federal Reserve gave the government after they went off the gold standard and how they’d put him away in some mental hospital and given him electroshock just for telling the truth to people, when she looked up and saw Sten standing there in the crowd by the bar with the blond woman she’d assumed was Carolee, and that was the end of that.

Adam had let out a low hiss of a curse, then turned his head to look and cursed again. Before she could think he was up and out the door and she had no choice but to follow him. Thing was, she couldn’t find him. He wasn’t in the car. And she sat there and waited for half an hour or more, till after Sten and his wife had left and gone up the block and around the corner to where they must have parked their own car, and then she drove around for another hour, going up and down the back streets that went ghostly in the fog. She saw cats. A coyote. A couple of drunks stumbling home. But no Adam. Finally, she’d given up and gone back to the house — which had to be fifteen miles from town, but what else could she do? When she woke in the morning, he was there beside her, curled up in the fetal position.

Now, trying to make small talk with Sten while dodging his wife and sipping her own margarita — she’d made a pitcher, frozen limeade, triple sec, tequila and the juice of a couple limes for the extra kick — she heard the crunch of tires on the gravel out front, which would have been Christabel. Finally. She was almost an hour late, typical of her, but why couldn’t she have been a little later, just this once?

They were on the porch, sitting at the redwood picnic table and talking about the glories of nature. Sten swirled the dregs of his drink around the bottom of the glass and showed every indication of wanting to get out of there but Carolee was still rattling things around in the house. You could smell the potatoes now, which meant it was time to put the cordon bleu on. “How you like staying out here in the woods?” he was asking in a general way, trying to be kind. “You are staying here now, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” she said, appending a little laugh, as if to say it was as much a surprise to her as to him. “Just temporarily. For a few days, I mean. Till I sort things out with my landlady.”

“Peaceful, isn’t it? Seen any deer? Coyotes?”

She was distracted, picturing Carolee trotting out to her car with an armload of things and encountering Christabel before she could introduce her, but she wasn’t going to let it show. “One coyote,” she said, looking past Sten to the new metal door, which had been propped open with a rock. “He comes by like every night, or so far, anyway, at eight-thirty or so, right on schedule,” she said, but then she broke off and gave him her richest smile. “That’ll be my friend, Christabel?” And then, maybe because she wanted his approval or at least a little acknowledgment of common ground — two educators, three—she added, “She’s a teacher’s aide.”

16

CHRISTABEL WAS WEARING HER black jeans, heels and a red spandex top that displayed her figure to good advantage, the sort of outfit she wore when they were going bar-hopping, which was a little puzzling because they weren’t going bar-hopping tonight, as Sara had made abundantly clear, or at least thought she had. They were going to have a homey night, drinking and laughing and eating a nice meal, and they were going to sit out here on the porch and feed the mosquitoes because Adam would definitely be more comfortable out of doors with a new person to deal with — if he stuck around, that is, and there was no guarantee of that. And while he likely wouldn’t be too thrilled to see Christabel there, whether on the porch or in the house or anywhere else, he was going to have to get used to it because she wasn’t about to give up her whole life however far this thing went. Plus — and she’d be the first to admit it — she wanted to show him off. If Christabel was jealous over the phone, just wait till she got a look at him.

Unfortunately, Christabel was out of sorts. She appeared there in the propped-open doorway with an exasperated look on her face, her lips pursed and her eyes beaming out all kinds of lethal rays that could have dissolved flesh and stone alike, because she’d been lost on a succession of dirt roads for the better part of the last hour and only found the place after stopping some old lady out walking her dog and having her draw a map on the back of a greasy McDonald’s bag. Sara didn’t know that, or not yet, but she shot her a frantic wave, in stride, hustling across the yard to intercept her and warn her about Sten and Carolee. Not that it was a huge deal or that she was apprenticing for the role of daughter-in-law or anything like that because Adam was strange and a week of hot sex didn’t make a relationship (though it was a damn good start and no denying it), but that the whole thing was awkward, her moving in and their happening to show up now of all times. Because this wasn’t really her house. And she didn’t really belong here.

Before she could warn her off, Christabel was saying, “Shit, Sara, I’ve been lost for an hour and my phone kept flashing that fucking infuriating no service light—”

“Hi,” she said, trying to smile and signal with her eyes at the same time, before turning to where Sten stood on the porch. “Sten, this is my friend I was telling you about?” Kutya surged round Christabel’s ankles, yapping out his joy as she made her introductions: “Christabel, Sten; Sten, Christabel.”

Then they were all on the porch and Sten was taking Christabel’s hand in his own and looking down the front of her blouse the way all men did when they liked what they saw, whether they were sixteen or sixty (or seventy in this case). “Nice to meet you,” Sten said, grinning like a gargoyle. He held her hand a beat too long, his eyes going from her face to her tits and back again. “I’m Adam’s father.”

And Christabel gave it over just like that. The frown was gone and here came the megawatt smile, the attraction mutual and all the social niceties spread out on the board. “Nice to meet you too. And I’m looking forward to meeting your son.” A pause. Was she actually licking the corner of her mouth? “Sara’s told me so much about him.” A laugh. “All about him, in fact.”

Chitchat followed — she’d heard he was retired and he’d heard she was a teacher’s aide, and she was, at Brookside Elementary, up in Willits, Special Ed, must be a tough job, oh, yeah, it was, but rewarding, you know? — and then the screen door pushed open and Carolee was standing in the midst of them, her arms encircling the last of the boxes. Sara saw the neck of a ceramic lamp with a staved-in shade poking out of the top, along with what looked to be a sheaf of children’s drawings on paper gone yellow with age and a blue cloche hat with a pheasant’s tail feather knifing out of it.

Carolee was sweating, though it wasn’t hot out at all — in the low seventies, if that. She’d tucked her hair behind her ears to get it out of the way and the skin at her temples glistened. She gave everybody present a sour look. “Don’t tell me,” she said, homing in on Christabel, “—not another one?”

“Here,” Sten said, “let me take that,” at the same instant Sara heard herself say, “You need any help?”

Carolee didn’t need any help. She was the mother and this was her mother’s house. She didn’t need any more introductions and she absolutely didn’t need to be wasting energy on social amenities or even being civil. Half a beat, then the box was in Sten’s arms and the two of them were heading down the steps and out the gate. Sten called “See you later” over his shoulder, and then they heard the slamming of the rear hatch and the two car doors, followed by the sucking whoosh of the car starting up and the stony protest of the gravel as the tires rolled on over it.

“Well, that was nice,” Christabel said. They were both still standing there on the porch, Sara with a half-empty margarita in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other, Christabel in her black heels that were already floured with dust, looking to the empty space in the cement-block wall as the aroma of the baking potatoes wafted out through the screen.

“Yeah,” Sara agreed, hardening her voice despite the fact that for some unnameable and untouchable reason, she felt like crying. “But really, what do I care?”

“It’s just a fling, right?”

“Yeah,” she said. “That’s all it is.”

The cordon bleu was done and set atop a trivet on the counter in the kitchen and she and Christabel were sitting at the table on the porch drinking the last of the margaritas preparatory to getting into the wine, when they heard a noise from inside the house, a thump, then the wheeze of a door on its hinges. “That’ll be Adam,” Sara said, feeling relieved, though she wouldn’t let it show on her face. He was late and she’d begun to worry that tonight of all nights would be the one he wouldn’t show. She’d told him she was thinking of having a friend over for dinner one night — a girlfriend, her best friend, somebody he was really going to like — and though he hadn’t reacted she couldn’t help getting the idea he wasn’t all that excited about the prospect.

Christabel turned to look over her shoulder. “What is he, a ghost? I thought this”—pointing across the yard to the metal door, which still stood open—“was the only way in? Or what, has he been hiding under the bed or something?”

She felt a tick of irritation. “Don’t be like that.”

“Like what?”

“You know: catty. Superior. And don’t you go talking down to him either.” There was another thump from inside and Kutya, who’d been lying at her feet, raised his head, moderately interested, before letting it drop again. “If you want to know, he just goes right up and over the wall — like Jackie Chan in that movie? It’s part of his training. Keeps him fit.” And then she turned her head too and called out, “Adam? Adam, you in there?”

No response. All the sounds of the world came crowding in, the birds, the insects, the soft rush and gurgle of the river that wasn’t much more than a stream this time of year, though it kept on dutifully flowing through all its bends and pools and on down to the harbor below.

“Training for what?” Christabel raised her eyebrows.

“I don’t know, just training. He likes to keep fit.” And then she called his name again: “Adam, we’re out here.” A pause, listening: still nothing. “I thought we’d eat out on the porch tonight—”

She was just about to get up and go in to see what he was up to — he was going to do this for her, be presentable, be cool, if she had any power over him at all, and she did, because he liked what she was giving him and he needed it too, just to get whole, to be whole and not some spooky recluse staring off into space and saying the first thing that came into his head. His grandmother used to cook for him and before that his mother. Now she was cooking for him — and no, she wasn’t old enough to be his mother, but then his mother never went to bed with him either. And here she had to laugh: At least I hope not.

“What’s so funny?” Christabel was leaning into the table, setting her glass down over its wet imprint in the wood, then lifting it and setting it down again as if it were the most delicate operation in the world. She was looking up at her, a collusive smile on her face. She’d already heard about the sex — Sara had told her everything, in detail, because she couldn’t help herself — and now she was expecting more.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, “just thinking of something, that’s all.” Then she was pushing herself up. “Let me go get him. I mean, dinner’s ready and I don’t want the meat drying out — plus, I think it’s time we poured some of that wine, don’t you?”

Christabel gave her a sloppy wide-lipped grin. “Hear, hear!”

She was feeling it herself, two and a half margaritas on an empty stomach, as she pushed through the screen door and into the living room, with its pine paneling gone dark from half a century of smoke, the old ladies’ lamps and wood-framed pictures and the couch that was older than she was. “Adam?” she called. Another thump, a shuffling of feet, and there he was, framed in the kitchen doorway, a beer in one hand, a half-gnawed portion of cordon bleu in the other. There was a crescent-shaped smear of dirt or grease or something on his forehead just over his left eye, and the boots he was always so careful with were crusted in mud, which had in turn left the kitchen floor a mess. “Jesus,” she said, “what happened to you — you fall in a swamp or what?”

She didn’t expect him to answer and he didn’t. He just stood there chewing, alternately lifting the chicken and the beer to his mouth.

“Christabel’s here, I was telling you about? We’ve been drinking margaritas and I think we’re a little wrecked.” She let out a giggle, the whole room composing itself around the silhouette of him there in the doorway, pixel by pixel, as if she were watching TV, which is how she knew just how wrecked she was and knew too that she’d have to put something on her stomach tout suite. “But dinner’s ready and we’re going to eat out on the porch, so why don’t you. .” She trailed off. “I mean, just clean up and come join us, okay?”

He didn’t move, but that was typical and he didn’t say anything either, which was also typical. “My father,” he said after a moment.

“Sara?” Christabel’s voice. “You in there? Need any help?”

“In a minute,” she called over her shoulder and turned back to Adam. “What about him?”

“He was here.”

“They both were, your mother too, and I’ll tell you, she treated me like dirt. And Christabel too.”

“If he touched anything, I’ll kill him,” he said, and now he was coming toward her and the light caught him so that she could see he was mud all over, pants and shirt and his hands too where they dangled from the soiled sleeves.

She put her hands on her hips. “He just hung the door, is all,” she said. “Your mother took a couple boxes of things from your grandma’s room—”

His face changed suddenly, hardened up as if it had been set in concrete. “Shit,” he spat. “Shit on her. And shit on you too.”

“Me? What have I got to do with it?”

“You let her.”

“I didn’t let anybody do anything. This is their house, not mine, remember?” She felt a little woozy suddenly and she wanted to go over and give him a kiss, mud or no, but instead she just cocked her head back and said, “If you want to get any tonight you better behave yourself. So go in and get washed up — and take your boots off first, you’re tracking the place all up — and then you come out and meet Christabel and make nice.” She lifted her wrist to squint at her watch, the hands of which she could just barely make out because her reading glasses were on the kitchen table next to the recipe book. “Dinner is served — or will be — in five minutes flat. Hear me?”

When he did show up at the table — with another beer, which must have been his second or third, and the canteen too — the mud was gone and his fingernails were clean, but he wasn’t wearing any clothes at all, only the towel cinched round his waist. Which he made a show of dropping when he pulled out the chair and sat down. Christabel, nonchalant, or at least pretending to be, said hello, but Adam ignored her. It wasn’t much past six but they were in the shadows here, the sun having sunk away into the canopy of the trees, and while it wasn’t cold yet it was getting there. You could see that Adam’s chest and arms were stippled with gooseflesh and his nipples were hard, though he wasn’t shivering. Let him play his games, Sara was thinking, but after she’d filled his wine glass and topped off Christabel’s and her own, she couldn’t take it any longer and finally had to ask, “Aren’t you cold?”

“Toughens you,” he said, though he wouldn’t look into her eyes.

“I was just going to get up and put on a jacket — what about you, Christa? You cold?”

But then Adam was talking, a miracle, as if a stone had cracked open and become fluent. “Colter wasn’t cold. Colter was butt-ass naked when they chased him — and that river he jumped into? That river was like ice.”

Christabel was just staring, running her eyes all over him, and she had that little smirk on her face. “Uh-uh,” she said, “I’m not cold,” and then, to Adam: “So you’re a nudist, huh? Sara never told me or I wouldn’t have bothered with all these clothes myself. Here,” she said, and she actually reached down, arched her back and worked the spandex top up and over her shoulders, pausing there a moment before pulling it over her head and balling it up on the table in front of her. She was wearing a black lace brassiere underneath and she was all gooseflesh too.

“Oh, come on, grow up, the two of you.” Sara was sitting there clinging to her wine glass, not upset, not yet, but maybe something less than amused. A whole lot less.

“You said you wanted to show me off,” Adam said in an even voice, and then he was rising from the chair so you could see all of him, cock, balls, pubic hair, everything. “Isn’t that right, Sara?”

All she could think to say was “Not at the table” and she was going to add that his mother must not have taught him any manners at all, making a joke of it, but checked herself — she didn’t want to provoke him because you never could tell what he was going to do next.

It wouldn’t have mattered because in the next moment Adam was gone — present, but gone, veering off into one of his reveries or spells or whatever you wanted to call it — his gaze focused on a point over Christabel’s head, on nothing, and his voice took on a weird metallic timbre as if there were a microphone stuck in his throat: “Party on down,” he said, echoing her, mocking her. “How about a threesome? You ladies up for a threesome?”

That seized her up, all right. She was no prude, but this was just him pushing her buttons to see how far he could go. He was still posed there, staring off into space, but now he was getting hard by degrees, click, click, click, and she couldn’t have that, not in front of Christabel, so she did the first thing that came to mind — she took up one of the grandmother’s antique-gold linen napkins and snapped it at him, right there, right where it hurt most, and what did Christabel do? She just burst out with a laugh.

Okay. Fine. But Adam got the message, both hands shooting to his groin, and then he sat down, wrapped the towel back around him, and without another word put his head down and began to eat. Christabel watched him a minute — fork to mouth, his jaws grinding — then let out a hoot and said, “What fun!”, shook out her top and pulled it back over her head, though it didn’t do her sprayed-up hair any good. And herself? She laughed too, couldn’t help it, and in the next moment, as the sky pulled down and the bats shot out of the trees to explode overhead, they were all three of them laughing to beat the band, and when they were done with dinner they went on into the house and built a fire and sat around it, watching the flames leap up the chimney and holding tight to their wine glasses until at some point, Adam, still wrapped in the towel, got up and slipped out the door and into the night.

17

IT WAS THE MIDDLE of the second week when she began to wake up to reality, at least that portion of it that had to do with money and earning a living. She’d had two jobs the week before, one all the way up in Redwood Valley, which would have been no problem if she’d been at home because that was practically in the neighborhood, and the other down in Navarro, at the winery there, where she saw to the owners’ horses on a regular basis, but that meant burning up gas and since she didn’t want to use her credit card — they could trace it — she had to use cash and her cash was running low. Most of her income, the lion’s share (or horse’s share, actually), came from her trade and the connections she’d made over the years, but she relied on subbing to supplement it and school was still out for the summer. And even if it wasn’t, how could they call her if she wasn’t home?

To complicate things, she didn’t have her calendar — or most of her clients’ numbers either, aside from the few she’d kept on the card double-folded in her wallet — and she was sure she must be missing appointments. For the past three mornings now she’d awakened with a jolt from dreams of fucking up, of being late, lost, unable to get where she was going in the hazy geography of dreamland that was clogged with wrong turns and the butts of horses galloping steadily away from her. That made her nervous. Irritable. She’d even snapped at Adam over breakfast when he started going on about Colter. “Colter,” she’d spat, slapping the flat of her hand down on the counter, “fucking Colter! I’ve only heard it like ten thousand times.”

He was sitting at the table, forking up French toast, and he shot her a look that should have warned her off, three parts hurt and one part pure slingshot rage.

“Can’t you ever talk about anything else? Like what you’re doing out there in the woods all day long? Huh? Like what you’re growing?”

What happened to the plate he was eating from, his grandmother’s china plate with the rose-cluster design on it? Up against the wall, syrup and all, and then down on the floor, in pieces. And Adam? He looked hate at her, then bulled right by her, and if she lost her balance and slammed against the kitchen cabinet it was nothing to him because he was snatching up his pack and jerking the rifle over his shoulder and then he was over the wall and gone without a word.

So she was sitting there in the kitchen in the aftermath of all this, brooding over things, Kutya licking the scraps off the floor and the sun trapped in the morning fog, which had managed to reach this far up just to depress her further, when it came to her that what she needed was to get into her house, whether they were watching it or not. She needed her calendar, where she’d always been careful to write out her appointments under the date, along with phone numbers, and in the case of word-of-mouth referrals, addresses. And she could use some clothes, having packed hastily to say the least. She was bored with what she was wearing — boots, jeans and the same two tops, in rotation — and figured Adam must be too. She hardly ever wore a dress, but she had half a closetful, including a cute yellow sundress with a scoop neck that still fit her in all the right places. Maybe Adam would like to see her in that, just for a change, to spice things up. And here she went off into an erotic daydream, him sitting there on the couch with the towel wrapped around him, already hard, and her coming across the room to climb atop him and lift the skirt up so he could see she wasn’t wearing anything underneath. .

It didn’t take her long to convince herself that they wouldn’t be watching her house. She was too small-time. She hadn’t killed anybody, had she? And she told them she was quarantining the dog, though it was just plain stupid because anybody could see he didn’t have rabies and what was a little scratch on some scrawny lady trooper’s hand? A quick raid on her own house, that was what she was thinking. But not in daylight — it might be totally paranoid to think they were watching the place twenty-four/seven, but it was very much in the realm of possibility that they’d send a patrol car by once in a while just to see if there was a vehicle in the driveway. No, she’d go at night. Tonight. Late. Adam would love the idea because here was another chance to stick it to them, and all at once she was replaying the scene at the animal shelter, how her blood had raced, beating like a drum circle, and how the two of them had laughed in the car as they rolled down the highway free and clear, laughed till they were gasping for air and she put a hand on his thigh and asked him if he wanted to party and he did. Oh yes, he did. With gusto. And the party was still going on.

When he came in around six he was wired on something, he wouldn’t say what, still pissed over what had happened that morning. “You’re out of line,” he told her, glaring at her, standing there poised over the sink in the kitchen that was sunlit and warm and peaking with the aroma of the homemade lasagna she’d sweated over half the afternoon. “Way out of line. Because for your information I’m not growing nothing.”

“Anything,” she said automatically.

Still the glare. “Nothing,” he said carefully. “I’m not growing nothing.”

It wasn’t really in her to be repentant — that just wasn’t her, sorry — but she tried her best to placate him, keeping her mouth firmly shut and handing him a margarita when he came up for air after dipping his head to the faucet and letting the water run over his face and scalp, saying everything she had to say with gestures, as if she were a deaf-mute. There was no mud on him, not a trace, though his boots were thick with trail dust, and he took the margarita without comment and went out to sit on the porch with it. She gave it a minute, then brought the pitcher out to him and her own glass too and they sat there in silence, pouring till the pitcher was empty. He wouldn’t look at her the whole time and she took the hint and made as if she were wrapped up in her own thoughts, the two of them sitting there in silence, getting a buzz on, but she couldn’t help sneaking glances at him — and not just to gauge his mood but because she loved watching him, the way he moved, the delicacy of his smallest gestures, how he circled the rim of the glass with his thumb and forefinger and brought it to his lips, his eyes narrowing in on something she couldn’t see, beautiful eyes set off with a girl’s lashes, eyes like flowers, like flowers in a field.

Then she served him the lasagna and poured him a beer — and poured herself one too, though the carbs went straight to fat on her — and when he started in on Colter and the Chinese she listened to as much of it as she could take before cutting him off. “Adam,” she said. “Listen, I’m sorry about this morning but the thing is I need some things up at my place — I mean, this is great here and all, but I feel like I’m camping out, you know what I’m saying?”

He shrugged as if it was nothing to him.

“My address book, for one thing. I need to get hold of everybody and make sure I’m not screwing up my appointments — and clothes, I need to pick up some clothes. Like a dress. Would you like that — me in a dress?”

Maybe he would, maybe he wouldn’t. But he wasn’t going to show her anything.

She dropped her voice till it was a purr in her throat: “What do you say to going up there tonight? Just you and me. Late, like maybe midnight or one maybe, when nobody’ll be around?” Her own lasagna was getting cold. She tapped the fork on the edge of the plate, tap-tap, anybody home? “A raid,” she said. “Let’s call it a raid.”

She was watching him closely, like that first day in the car, and she could see she was having an effect. He’d gone still, the beer clutched in one hand, fork in the other. After a moment, he set down his beer and swiveled his neck to bring his eyes to hers, and he wasn’t staring through her now — now he was seeing her.

“Well,” she said, “what do you say?”

“Cool,” he said. “I’ll bring the rifle.”

“What? What are you talking about?” His eyes were on her still and he was holding on to that half-formed grin of his that seemed to stick in the corner of his mouth as if his lips just couldn’t lift it all the way up. “No,” she said, “no way. That’s just crazy.”

She hated guns and she put her foot down, or tried to, because this really was overkill, not to mention a recipe for disaster, but five hours later there they were following the track of her headlights up the hill on a moonless night, his gun propped between them — not in the trunk, not laid out flat on the floor in the backseat — and a pair of night-vision goggles dangling from his neck. He’d drawn two slashes of oil or greasepaint or whatever it was under his eyes like the players you’d see on Monday Night Football if you were unlucky enough to be bar-hopping in the middle of it and he was so amped up he kept talking about the plan, what the plan was and how they were going to execute it — his word: execute.

“Look,” she told him, leaning into one of the wicked switchbacks that seemed to chase the car all over the road (and she wasn’t drunk, not even close — just a little buzzed), “it’s all in good fun, but that thing isn’t loaded, is it? It’s not going to go off and blow a hole in the roof or anything—?”

He didn’t answer. She’d already extracted a promise from him that he wasn’t going to do anything more than just sit there in the car — which she was going to park down the street from the house, out of sight — and wait for her. Ten minutes, that was all she was going to need and he could just sit tight, okay? Was he cool with that?

They hadn’t seen a single car since they’d turned onto the highway and that had helped with her blood pressure, which must have been spiking despite the alcohol in her system because she was regretting ever having mentioned this whole fiasco to him — she should have just waited till he was asleep and snuck on up the road by herself and he’d never have been the wiser. But she’d wanted some moral support (that was a laugh: it was more like amoral support where he was concerned) and things had sort of ratcheted out of control. He was a boy, playing war games. She could understand that. But this was no toy rifle and if he saw a cop, any cop, anywhere, who could tell what he might do? And what would that make her — accessory to murder? It was bad enough that the next time a cop stopped her she’d be going straight to the county jail, and while she wasn’t ready to accept that or genuflect to the system either, she was still smart enough to stay out of its way as much as possible. You couldn’t fight them. Look what had happened to Jerry Kane. She’d tried to tell him about that, how the pigs had shot dead one of the gurus of the movement, the foremost, the very man whose seminars she’d attended and who’d opened her eyes and revolutionized her life, gunned him down in a Walmart parking lot in Arkansas and his sixteen-year-old son along with him, but it just seemed to go in one ear and out the other.

“I said, that thing isn’t loaded, right? Because if it is, I’m just going to turn around right here and now. You hear me?”

His voice, soft as fur, came at her out of the darkness: “Jesus, you sound like my mother. But you’re not my mother, right?”

And that got her, that reminded her of what was real, what counted, what she was doing here on this dark road. With him. “No, baby,” she said, softening, and she reached out her hand to him. “I’m not your mother, I’m your lover. And when we get home, watch out.”

So that was that. Whether the gun was loaded or not or whether she was going to enter into a contract with the sheriff’s department under threat, duress and coercion and go to jail for the better part of her natural life or wind up shot herself or just assert her right to travel in her own personal property to her own house and reclaim the personal property she kept there was anybody’s guess. But it was late and Willits wasn’t exactly Times Square and they’d be turning off well before they got into town proper and there really wasn’t anything that could go wrong. She was just being a slave and a coward even to think it. The cops were asleep. And so was everybody else.

18

WHEN THEY WERE COMING up on her turnoff she couldn’t decide whether to use her signal or not, but then she figured not, because if anybody was watching why broadcast her intentions? “This is it up here,” he said suddenly, fully alert and ready for anything, and she was impressed that he could pick out the road in the dark even though he’d only been to the house once. He was smart — and he’d been born with an internal compass too, no ravine or trail or gulley or back road too remote for him, the kind of person who would always land on his feet no matter where you tossed him. And if there was one thing he wasn’t, it was a coward. Or a slave. He might have been in outer space half the time, but if ever there was anybody born who would take them on, no holds barred, he was the one. And maybe that was suicidal, maybe it was mental — it was, it definitely was — but as she turned into the dark lane between the two vestigial fenceposts that picked the thread of it out of the night for her, she was glad he was there. If anything happened, which it wouldn’t, she’d at least go out in a blaze of glory.

The front end let out a little shriek and then the tires were hissing along the blacktop and she flicked off the headlights, just in case. “Blaze of glory,” she said aloud, tailing it with a nervous cackle, and she was as crazy as he was, Jesus.

She pulled just off the road a hundred yards from her house, then thought better of it and swung a U-turn so the car was facing the other way in case they needed to make a quick exit. With no moon, her house was in darkness, nothing showing there but what the stars gave up. Ditto the L-shaped ranch house of her closest neighbors, the Rackstraws, an older couple with grown children out of the house and a dog so ancient and decrepit it had forgotten how to bark. “Okay,” she said, her fingers wrapped around the door handle, “you know the drill. I’m just going in the house, my own house, that’s all, for like ten minutes. And you’re just going to sit here, right? Don’t even get out of the car. Okay?”

She watched him a moment, the profile of him, too dark to see his features — all she could tell was that he was staring straight ahead, out the windshield and down the road the way they’d come. And that he was wound up, strung tight as wire. “Okay?” she repeated and leaned in to peck a kiss to his cheek before she slipped out of the car and started up the road.

As soon as the door eased shut and she was out there in the night, her tension began to fade. This was her home, her turf, the place where she’d lived for the past eight and a half years since she’d given up on Roger, the place where she walked Kutya and exercised her clients’ horses in the fields and sat out on the deck in the evenings to watch the sun slip down over the distant gray band of the ocean. What was she afraid of? It was her right to be here — it was anybody’s right. This was a free country. Or so they claimed.

Everything was quiet but for the soft percussion of her heels on the pavement and the intermittent grinding of a solitary cricket in the dark dried-up field to her left. Her night vision came back to her incrementally as her eyes adjusted, though she could have found her way blindfolded. Her strides lengthened. She breathed in the night air, fragrant with a lingering sweetness the afternoon sun had pulled out of the weeds and wildflowers, and she felt freer than she had in a long time — at least since that idiot cop had come after her and turned her whole life inside out.

Before she knew it she was heading up the gravel drive, the pea stone — pale in contrast with the darker void of the yard — looking almost as if it were illuminated. It crunched underfoot though, so she stepped off into the dirt: no reason to make noise if she didn’t have to. She fished the keys from her purse, a faint tinkle of metal, and she was actually heading for the front door before catching herself. She stopped, listened, telling herself she was just being crazy, then slipped round back anyway. Another tinkle as the key turned in the lock and she was in.

For a long moment she stood just inside the kitchen door, in the darkness, debating whether to turn the lights on. She could smell the garbage from all the way across the room, whatever was in there when she’d left gone rancid and probably attracting ants too — they were a problem in this place, always had been, black rivers of them flowing in under the door and darkening the counters, the walls, even the ceiling sometimes. No matter. She’d deal with all that later. Now she just needed to get her address book and her calendar and some clean clothes — and that dress, or maybe a couple of dresses, like the yellow and white polka dot, which was real summery and looked great with her strappy sandals — and then lock up and forget about the place for a while. Let the ants have it.

Ultimately, she did turn the lights on, first in the kitchen, then in the hall where her desk was, and finally in her bedroom. She didn’t bother folding things, just stuffed a couple blouses, some underwear, another pair of jeans and her dresses and sandals into a kitchen-tall garbage bag and rolled up the calendar and tucked it in her purse. She was getting ready to leave, giving things a final look-over, trying to think what she was forgetting — she had her address book, her checkbook, her moisturizer and nail polish remover, the special shampoo she used for dandruff, stamps, envelopes, a beach towel and her bathing suit, just in case he wanted to go swimming some afternoon — when the first rattling burst of gunfire split the night in two and she just about jumped out of her skin.

Talk about panic, talk about going from the launching pad straight up into orbit in the space of a single heartbeat, well here it was. She didn’t have time to think, just run. Later she would find that she’d bruised herself above her left knee, but she couldn’t for the life of her recall how or when, just that it must have happened in those first few panicky seconds when she was racing through the house to shut off the lights and slam through the back door and out into the blinding dark, where the sharp crackling rattle of gunfire split the night open all over again. But what was it? Where was it? She stumbled across the yard, clutching her purse and the garbage bag to her chest, the night unfolding in layers till she could see again, her breath coming hard and her feet pounding across the gravel — there was the pale outline of the drive, there the dark erasure of the road and the still darker hump of her car planted rigid and unmoving at the side of it and she was running even as the light flashed on in the Rackstraws’ front window and the dog that hadn’t made a sound in the last five years started howling as if it had been set on fire.

And where was Adam, where was he, no shape or shadow of him in the passenger’s seat as she jerked open the driver’s door and flung her things in, calling “Adam! Adam!” in a hot fierce whisper that sounded in her own ears like a scream. Her fingers trembled as she rifled through the purse for her keys and then she had them in the ignition and the engine jumped to life and the headlights flew out like heat-seeking missiles and there he was, Adam, right there in front of the car, the rifle tucked under one arm and the twin pinpoints of his eyes throwing the light back at her.

“Jesus!” she shouted, her head out the window now. “What are you doing? Get in the car, get in!” Something changed behind her, something qualitatively different now — another light, the Rackstraws’ porch light, floodlight, whatever it was — and somebody’s voice, a man’s voice, Jack Rackstraw’s, thundering, “What’s going on down there?”

“Adam,” she said, “Adam,” and it was like a plea, a prayer, an invocation to get them out of there, and she couldn’t leave him, she couldn’t, but her heart was going into overdrive and she actually had her hand on the gearshift to shove the thing into reverse and back away from him when the door pulled open and he slid into the seat and slammed the door shut again and she hit the accelerator with a foot that really didn’t know what it was doing beyond finding that place where the tires would grab and the car would hurtle off into the tunnel the high beams carved out of the night.

“Kill the lights,” he said, and it was the first thing either of them had said since he’d got in the car. They were out on Route 20 now, heading back down the hill, and there was nobody behind them as far as she could see, but then that didn’t mean anything, did it? They had helicopters, whole fleets of cruisers, guns and more guns. She was going too fast, she knew it. The tires screeched. She jerked at the wheel. She was in a state, close to breaking down and screaming her head off, susceptible, fully susceptible — but this didn’t make any sense to her. Shut off the lights? Now? On the highway? In the dark?

He repeated himself, his voice honed and hard: “I said, kill the lights.”

She swung wildly through a turn and then looped back the other way, through the next one, her palms sweating and her eyes jumping at the road ahead. “I can’t,” she said, “we’ll go off the road. I can hardly see as it is—”

“Here,” he said, and he was thrusting something at her — what was it? Heavy plastic, slick glass: the night-vision goggles.

“I can’t — what are you doing?”

“Slow down,” he said. “Watch the road.”

And then they both froze, the sound of the siren riding up on them out of nowhere. A whoop, a scream. It jabbed right into her, shoved itself up under her flesh like a hypodermic scoured with acid. This was it, she knew it, she was done, doomed, everything she’d built in her life gone out the window — she wasn’t going to have to worry about being a slave to the system anymore because she was going to be a prisoner of it. In a jail cell. With what — a tray of mush and insta-food shoved through a slit in the door three times a day? She wanted to pull over, wait for the inevitable, but she didn’t. She just kept on driving, kept on going down, one turn, then the next, but where was the siren coming from — behind them or out in front?

There was a whoop, another whoop, then it faded, then whooped again. “Are they—?” she asked, but never got to finish the question because here came the sheriff’s dead-black cruiser hurtling up the hill in the opposite lane, lights flashing, one suspended moment as the thing rocked past them, Adam motioning with the gun and she furious and spitting “No, no!” at him, and then it was gone and vanished round the next bend.

“The pigs,” he snarled. “The fucking pigs.”

She didn’t feel as if she was driving anymore but sailing, and not across some calm picture-postcard bay, but into a dark maelstrom dragging her down to some darker place still. She stabbed at the brakes, hard, and the force of it threw them both forward — seatbelts, who needed seatbelts? — and he hit the windshield with a sudden heavy wet resonance she could feel like a blow to her own body, the car careening toward the trees, everything held in the balance before it caught on the hard compacted dirt of the shoulder and straightened itself out, and still she was driving and still they were going downhill.

When she could talk, when the words came back to her, stingy, squeezed, caught in her throat, she asked him if he’d hurt himself, was he okay, was he bleeding?

He didn’t answer. But she could feel him there at her side, glowering, outraged, all his jets on high. A minute passed. Two. The trunks of the trees flipped past like cards in a fanned deck.

“Here,” he said suddenly. “Stop here. Turn.”

She saw a dirt road rushing up on the right, a wide mouth of nothing cut between a ragged avenue of trees, and for once she did as she was told.

Later, after they’d rocked and swayed for what seemed like hours over a series of pits and craters and washboard corrugations, a campground appeared under the canopy of the trees, her headlights catching the glint of metal, cars there, half a dozen of them, parked in darkness, and he told her to pull over and shut down the engine. “Here?” she said. “Yeah, here.” She switched off the ignition and killed the lights and everything vanished. The darkness was absolute — they might as well have plunged down a mine shaft somewhere, no trace here even of the stars. And if there were campers out there, they weren’t sitting around campfires roasting marshmallows, not at this hour. They must have had tents, but in the instant before the lights went out she hadn’t seen any. Aren’t you afraid of him? Christabel had asked.

Well, here was the test of it. And the answer? Yes and no. Yes, she was afraid he was going to do something crazy, like shoot off his goddamned gun, which he’d already proved fully capable of doing, but no, she wasn’t afraid to be there with him in the blackest depths of the blackest night she’d ever dreamed or imagined. He was right there beside her, breathing steadily. She could smell him, the sweat of him, the neat’s-foot oil he used on his boots, a faint chemical drift of the rum on his breath. He’d brought her here because that cruiser was going to turn around, he was sure of it, because their car was the only one on the only roadway through these hills, one way in, one way out, and now they were safe because no cop would ever think of looking for them here — no cop even knew it existed, she’d bet anything. She breathed out, breathed in. Closed her eyes and opened them again and it made no difference. All right. So they’d had an adventure and here they were, together, in the dark.

All the adrenaline had gone out of her or been reabsorbed or whatever was supposed to happen to it and she felt a deep peace steal over her. “What now?” she asked, though she already knew.

His voice came at her out of the void. “We sleep.”

“Just sleep?”

He didn’t answer but she could picture him wearing his little smirk, which was answer enough for her.

“You want to get comfortable?” she asked. “Like in the backseat?”

There was the sound of liquid sloshing around its container, liquid in motion. “You up for a hit of rum?”

“No, I don’t think so.” She was hot for him, hotter than ever, excitement running through her like a burn, but she had to ask him one more thing before she pulled her blouse up over her head and dropped her bra and let him nuzzle there like the child he was. “Adam?”

“Colter. Call me Colter.”

“What were you shooting at? There was nobody there. You weren’t even supposed to get out of the car.”

He was silent a long while. Finally, he said, “You accusing me?”

“No. I’m just, I just want to know what you were shooting at—”

“Hostiles,” he said, his voice as disembodied as if she were talking to him on the phone, long-distance, the words dropped down and filtered out of the buzz of the universe and nobody listening in but her and her alone. “I told you,” he said, “they’re everywhere.”