California: A Novel (10 page)

Micah had grown so secretive about the Group that he would have killed Toni for telling Frida all this. Cal either wasn’t interested or he was derisive, and even if Frida had wanted to join the Group, Micah would have denied her entry. She had fallen in love with a man who had dismissed her brother’s passion, and for that, Micah withheld everything from her.

One day Toni showed up at Frida’s place and said she was done with the meetings.

“What happened?” Frida asked.

Toni said she’d stood to suggest an all-female delegation. She thought that might help things; let the older members tell the younger women how the system worked. She tried to present it as a way to strengthen bonds. No one seemed interested. Before Toni could even sit down, Leanne stood to ask Micah if he wanted her to mop the floors after the meeting.

Toni said she didn’t mean to plunge her sharp, rusty bobby pin into the bitch’s arm, it just happened.

After that, Toni was still a member, still involved, just not on a weekly basis. Or so Frida assumed, until the Group blew up the entrance to the county hospital. No one could prove they’d done it, but it was obvious to Frida it had been their work. The hospital had begun to charge for entrance into the emergency room—cash or gold only—and a man had died of dehydration in the parking lot. The Group had allegedly thrown a Molotov cocktail through the sliding glass doors. The man taking money at the entrance had been killed, and a nurse lost her hand.

Two days later, during a run, Frida asked Toni about their last stunt. “What the hell, you guys?”

Toni sped up. “I’m over it. The Group is Micah’s thing.” She didn’t want to talk about it. She was no longer a member. Just like that.

Micah also wouldn’t explain. “We’ve moved in a new direction” was all he’d say.

Not long after, Toni was supposed to meet her for a run, but when Frida opened the door, Micah was there. He’d shaved his head, and beneath a sharp stubble of hair, his scalp stunned white.

“Where’s Toni?” Frida asked.

“She’s gone,” he said. He was very calm.

“Where did she go?”

“She left.”

Frida thought he meant she’d simply moved out, but, no, she was
gone.
Frida never saw or heard from her again. Everyone guessed she had gone back to her grandmother in Washington after all. Sometimes, even now, Frida thought of Toni in one of the Communities. She was running down a smooth, paved road. There were cameras on every corner and uniformed guards, and she felt safe and clean. She probably had a baby.

Frida pulled the pants out of the bag again and shook them so they hung straight. She walked over to the big rock and lay them flat across its surface. It wasn’t time to go yet. She wasn’t finished.

Cal wanted Frida to be pregnant. And Frida wanted that, too, if she was honest with herself. It felt like a dare, the biggest, most important risk of all. Micah would think so. Before the Group ruined him, when his mind was still open, fluorescent as plankton, he might’ve written her a letter that said,
Go ahead, believe in it. Don’t get all afraid on me.

“I’m not afraid,” she said aloud.

The way her voice sounded in the morning air made her turn around. Was it some desire for a reply? No one was there, just the trees. This didn’t surprise her, but she did feel disappointed, as if she’d been stood up. But by whom? The creek rushed along, oblivious, and across the water, the forest waited. She and Sandy used to go foraging there, but they always stopped before getting in too deep, before the land became alien.

In a moment, she had the mesh bag full of Cal’s socks, and she was crossing the creek. The trees seemed to step aside, to let her into the darkness.
After you,
they whispered. She walked farther, in a direction she’d never gone. But there was a path here, slightly overgrown, and she saw the track marks of August’s carriage. She knew he carried a scythe to cut away brush as he traveled; it was as if he had cleared the way for her.

She draped a single sock on the branch of a tree. The fabric was gray and thin, and it had once belonged to Bo. Now it was a crumb that would lead her back. Hilda and Dada and Micah would be a fairy tale to her baby, but for Frida, this world here, the afterlife, was the fairy tale. If she wasn’t careful, Frida would be eaten by a witch at the end of her journey.

In a few moments, August’s tracks led to a narrow trail, thick redwoods on either side. Frida paused, hands clenching the bag of socks. She sighed. “I’m not afraid,” she said again, as if to remind herself. She placed a red sock on a branch and kept walking.

Every few minutes or so, she left a piece of clothing for herself to find on her way back. And she
would
find her way back. The longer she walked, the more her chest tightened. She’d felt like this before, driving lost in L.A., her Navigator
and
her Device dead. She’d pass through a rough neighborhood hoping to find something familiar so she could breathe again, blink again, though, by the end, every neighborhood that wasn’t a Community was rough. She was alert in that same way now. She had to pay attention, or she might get turned around, never find the thread of the route. The clothing wouldn’t be any help if she headed in the wrong direction. She had created a system: colored clothes meant turn right, black and white ones meant turn left, and gray, head straight. She kept her eyes on landmarks: The tiny stream. The vines choking a thick trunk. A lone crocus.

After she had walked for about an hour, she saw something white up ahead. She quickened her pace, even as she wanted to turn around.

It was a bathtub, with claw feet like a beast’s. The inside was rusted out and filled with brown rainwater, green algae floating on its surface. Something jagged snagged Frida’s throat, and she swallowed it down. Here was evidence of other people. A person had abandoned this here.

What was she doing? She had to pee, and she only had two pairs of socks left. If Cal came to find her at the creek, maybe to talk, he would worry. And then, later, he’d be so angry. She had to turn around before she came upon other objects. Before someone stepped in her path with a weapon.

But first, she hiked up her dress and squatted next to the tub. She pulled down her leggings and peed. There was an atavistic relief to this, and her eyes watered from the pleasure. The end of the world couldn’t take this tiny joy away from her. She was a dog, marking her territory.

Frida was here.

As she stood, pulling up her leggings, her dress falling back to her ankles, a sound caught her attention. Something like a crunch, like someone stepping on fallen leaves. She froze, that jagged thing rising in her throat once more. “Hello?” she whispered.

No answer.

Relax,
she told herself,
it’s nothing.
Couldn’t be. But still, she thought she felt a presence not far from where she stood. Something, someone, was watching her, its breath shaping the molecules between them. She was breathing in that same air.

She stepped away from the bathtub. She would hurry back to the creek and then return to Cal. Nothing had happened; she was safe.

From behind a tree, another crunch. The sound came from her left, and she turned.

A coyote. It was standing there, watching her. It didn’t look like the starving ones that used to skulk around L.A., desperate for a cat to eat, some garbage scraps. This one was well fed, big, with coarse brownish-gray fur that looked prickly to the touch. If Frida didn’t know any better, she might think she’d run into a strange dog, tall and eerie eyed. It was so still.

A bird cawed above them.

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

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

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

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

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

Frida turned and ran.

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

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

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

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

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

“No,” she said.

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

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

“You did
what?
”

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

He didn’t answer.

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

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

“Why are you being so duplicitous?”

He smirked. “Good word.”

“I’m pregnant, Cal.”

“So now you’re sure about that.”

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

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

“Just tell me what you know.”

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

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

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

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

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

T
hey had packed two bags. Cal carried the larger camping backpack, and Frida had Bo’s rucksack.
Rucksack:
that was Bo’s word, and Frida said it made her think of a rugged country place, where men wore cowboy hats and called grown women
gals.
The rucksack was olive colored and dusty. After an hour, she said its straps bit into her shoulders, but she refused to let Cal carry it for her. She was trying to be tough.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cal reached down to pick up a sock.

“What’s this doing here?” he asked.

“I told you, I was doing laundry.”

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

“Just forget about it,” she said.

“Where did you pee?”

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

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

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

“I know you will.”

“Are you feeling okay?”

“I’m great, why?”

“I mean, do you feel different?”

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

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

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

“It was stupid to lie to you.”

“We all have our secrets,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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