Chapter 12

June 27, 1997 · Gone Twenty-Four Hours

THOUGH THERE WAS ONE CENTRAL ROAD through the valley, side roads—paved, dirt, animal—bloomed off the main artery in ever-changing pathways impossible to map. There were trails carved by machete, twisting deer paths through the woods, creek crossings made of signposts that had been knocked down and wired together, and Luce's bike dug into whatever was beneath it, nearly swerving into a tree to avoid a black rat snake crossing the trail because she hadn't been paying attention—too focused on squinting toward the road. On any sound that might be her mother returning.

She didn't have to pedal far to reach Juan. Face pocked and head wild with gray shag, he waved when he saw her. "La Goose, mi corazoncita," he called. In front of him lay a huge metal trap.

"What're you doing?" she asked, laying her bike against a tree. She loved Juan, and at least here, for a moment, the world felt normal.

"Improving my traps," he said, tilting his head at the enclosure in front of him to get a different view. A few small animal carcasses lay on a nearby tarp. Juan had once worked as head of a prominent evolutionary biology research lab and had given it up to move out here, not to study the women, he promised, but to be in the presence of this kind of evolution. He lived a few thousand feet down from her house, through the trees and over downed logs, and had always seemed old to Luce even though he was not much older than her mother, but he'd been damaged in Vietnam, something to his back and maybe also his head, though Luce thought he was one of the smartest people she'd ever met. "I'm hoping to gain strength," he said, "by having some blood on my hands."

"What a creep you are," she said, feigning disgust. She could hear the sound of a motor climbing the hill, though she could already tell it didn't have the rattle of her mother's car. Juan didn't pay it any attention.

"We're a violent species," he said, unfolding a knife and, as if to prove his point, slitting a rabbit across the neck. He reached his fingers into the cut and began to tug the skin apart. Luce shrugged at him—Now, really?—but he kept going. "We evolved with violence. Make your hand into a fist," he said, his own hands still inside the rabbit, and fine, what would it hurt to indulge him? Besides, his points often helped her understand the outside world. Its violence. She held her fists up as if she were ready to spar. "Okay, Rocky," he said. "See how your thumb isn't tucked? We're the only species with hand proportions that allow us to use the buttress of that giant thumb muscle to protect our hands when we punch. Our fingers don't break. We hurt each other badly. It's a perfect weapon."

"What bullshit are you going on about?" came a voice from the road. It was Gramms, wearing her wolf sweatshirt again despite the June sun. She ambled slowly side to side, widening her arms toward both Luce and Juan and they took turns folding into her hug, Juan with the half-skinned rabbit still dangling from one hand. Luce could see Gramms's golf cart parked on the side of the road—she'd stopped being able to drive a car a while back, so she got herself a golf cart and glued every fuzzy, sparkly, shimmery piece of trash that came her way to its roof—to scare away the vultures thinking she was a dead cow, she said. Luce felt the tightness in her shoulders unclench. Finally, someone who would have heard from Gloria, who would have instructions on what to do next. "Saw you from the road as I was coming to check on you and Roo, Goose—has your mama come home?"

"No," Luce said, asking what her mother had told Gramms exactly about when she'd be back.

"Honey, I haven't spoken to her in many days, I'm sorry to say," Gramms said, fishing something out of a molar with her fingernail. Luce didn't realize how much she'd been relying on Gramms or Juan to have seen her, to have an answer. She shifted her weight to the other foot, trying to recalibrate—the adults who should know where Gloria was didn't know. But there might be some way they could help; she explained the situation, telling them about the calling man. "Did you see him come up to the house?"

With his free hand, Juan sipped his tin cup, peppermint schnapps wafting toward Luce. "Nobody came to your house."

Luce crossed her arms over her chest. "Maybe you were gone for a while, or missed it—"

But Juan cut her off. "Kiddo, I'm not good for much these days, but you know as well as I do that I don't often leave my homestead here." In one tug he pulled the skin off the rabbit's legs, the final tufts like shoes still attached. "There's no way for someone to pass by on the road without me noticing. I was paying extra attention because I knew a bunch of outsiders were in the valley. Nobody came up here. And, come to think of it, I didn't see your mom go by either. She must not have come home." Well, that was something—she'd not come back to the house. So where did that leave Luce? She imagined the whole of the Red Grove, every trail and nook where her mother might have gone.

"Don't look so sullen, girl," Gramms said. "No creep up here by your house. That's good news." Luce nodded, wiggling the tip of her toe into the dirt. She needed to widen her idea of where her mother might have gone. She could do that. "I'm going up the road to check on your brother and auntie," Gramms said. "You wanna come?" Luce shook her head. She had more to do. Gramms blew them a kiss, and then they heard the thrum of her engine fade away.

Juan was slitting the belly, beginning to gut the rabbit. It was good for her to watch this, Luce thought, her stomach churning. This was a body turned inside out; this was real life, and the strongest among them would not be repulsed by nature. She had waited to ask Juan the question about this list of names, because part of her felt like she'd done wrong, breaking into the office, gathering what wasn't hers. Juan was stretching the rabbit skin out on a drying rack. A fly landed on the hairless pink body.

She handed him the list of names she'd found in her mother's office. "Does this mean anything to you?" He wiped his hands on his pants and pulled a pair of scratched, warped readers from his pocket.

Juan mumbled the names aloud to himself, scratched at his cheeks. "I don't really know, kiddo. Didn't you have some troubles, early on, with your mom?" Luce wanted to laugh. As if it had only been early on. "And didn't you stay for a little while in the guest room at Heartwood?" Luce hadn't thought about that in so long, but it was true. A few years back, when she was eleven or twelve and first started her role as guide through the darkness. Her mother had been furious. Didn't understand, couldn't, how she could be trusted with something so important. So dangerous. She's never trusted me, Luce told Una on one of their walks. She doesn't believe in me, she'd said, and it felt so true, it burned her chest. And so Una had offered for Luce to spend a few days in the guest room at Heartwood while it was open between new families coming in. Una stayed in another room, and other people were always coming and going, so Luce was never lonely. She was, for the first time since Gem's everdream, unlonely. She helped prepare group meals, looked after the little kids after preschool, practiced her nighttime guiding. She went with Una outside the community, to run errands in the next town over, grocery shopping, pharmacy pickups, the thrill of the DMV, all the things she'd have been terrified to do on her own, scared even to go with her own mother, but with Una? To be with her was to wear armor. She told this to Juan, who nodded his head, took another sip from his cup.

"Thought so," he said. "Tangerine stayed at Heartwood alone too. She's on the list. And Bryce. I don't know about the other kids on this list, but the ones I recognize have that in common. You all had some family issue."

Luce knew plenty of stories about kids in the community who'd been put into the guest rooms at Heartwood alone as a kind of rehab, somewhere in the center of many sets of eyes. She and her friends tossed them into the middle of conversations with alternating pity and reverence, Icarus cases, they called them, for the kids who had tried to fly too close to the sun. The crash was terrible, but that journey up toward the light—who could resist that kind of beauty? Bryce, one of the other kids who'd stayed at Heartwood alone, was an Icarus, a kid who took acid at eleven and got stuck. He was a couple of years older than she was, and she felt a little warmth remembering her crush on him from years back, his dark, buzzed hair, skateboarding after school like any normal kid, and then he was living inside a world that was different from the one he'd been in. You could see it in his eyes, how wide they were, how the balls didn't seem to roll around smoothly anymore, but were jagged with stops and starts, like a bad animation. Rumor was he'd hated it in the Red Grove, all the rules and ceremonies. He used to scare girls on the way home from school. They'd be riding their bikes and he'd be crouched inside a bush on the edge of the road. The kids would always say he jumped out and spooked them, but Luce was there once, riding not far behind a group of kids, and he didn't jump out. He stayed right in that bush. Someone said the drugs unlocked a mental illness that was already inside his head. But they were free here to explore their desires, and this was the necessary risk of absolute freedom.

"Tell you what, Goose," Juan said, knife tip opening the chest cavity. "As soon as I'm done here, I'll hop in my car and drive all the Red Grove's roads until I see her car. You head home, stay with Roo, and we'll tell each other what we find out. Only a fool would mess with Gloria. She'll be back soon. I'm sure of it."

Her bike tires gripped small rocks, humped over sticks as she pedaled faster and faster down the back paths, keeping her eyes open to everything she passed, anything that might have witnessed her mother, any flash of a clue. Light through the dense trees above left only the occasional dollop of light on the dirt, and the damp fern earth smell was thick and hot.

Gordon Prince was outside on his deck, his eyes closed, practicing tai chi, so he didn't wave as she passed. She rode on. There was Mariposa, in her cottage, smoking a cigarette and staring out the window—she didn't come out much, a newer arrival and one of the few who'd had to repeat the walk through the darkness a few times before she could make the whole walk alone. Through an open front door Luce saw Kelly Able napping on a couch, her huge Rhodesian ridgeback coiled into the crook of her knees. And then Nancy Able outside, weeding. Outside the Red Grove, Nancy Able had been Nick Able, and only since coming somewhere she'd be safe was she able to be who she really was—she'd told the story many times at community gatherings. The Red Grove kept women safe, Una would say, and when someone in the group had a technical question about womanhood, Una responded with what she'd learned had always been true in the Red Grove: the only person who could decide you were a woman was your own damned self.

Nancy caught Luce's eye as she rode past and waved her over. This wasn't what Luce wanted right now, not at all, and for a split second she pretended not to notice, but changed her mind. Una would stop to talk to anyone who wanted to talk to her. Luce had to practice the same.

Nancy pulled her tight in a hug, all warm soil smell. "I'm worried about you," she whispered into Luce's hair, New Jersey still thick in her voice. Pillowy body. "I'm worried about your mama. And your brother. I know other folks here are saying she's fine, of course she'll be back soon, but I'm a worrier." Luce felt a release of worry rise into her chest, her throat warm. Nancy kept her face close to Luce's. "I'm going to drop off a casserole tonight. And," her voice got quieter and she glanced around quickly before continuing to speak, "if you want to call the police or the FBI or whoever, you tell me. I'll back you up."

Luce was shaking her head before she even realized—of course she wouldn't call any authorities. Cops blundered evidence, didn't solve seventy percent of the violent crimes against women, let the world outside the Red Grove spin on in its chaotic, dark, violent tilt. Luce said they'd be fine.

"Of course you will," Nancy said, putting a little more distance between them. "I'd never call without you telling me to, of course, honey. Just—hold on one sec," she said, and darted inside, then reappeared with a plate. "Piggies in a blanket," she said, beelining one into Luce's mouth and then another into her own. She chewed twice, and then, mouth full, said, "I'm not one of the people who moved here because they'd been physically hurt in the past, and thank god for that. But I believe in the Red Grove so damned much… pardon my French." She pushed some escaping puff pastry back into her mouth. "And I think being here without, you know, the damage that can happen to people who have been hurt gives me a unique perspective. So if you need help, I'm right here." She licked her fingers then and gestured toward the plate, which still held a dozen pigs. "I'll only ask this one last time," Nancy whispered hurriedly as Luce packed her pockets full of food. "You don't have to be the bad guy. I can call the police for you. Okay?"

Luce stopped, her hands jammed deep in her pocket. "No. I said no." She took a fistful of pigs in a blanket out from her pocket and dumped it back on the plate.

The stilted summer air was cooler on her face once she was moving again, bumping over sticks and pebbles. It felt good to have Gramms and Juan know what was going on, help figure it out. Even Nancy Able's misguided questions were the tiniest bit comforting, even if Nancy was obviously overstepping what was necessary or helpful, and even if Luce had reacted more childishly than she would have liked.

She had no real destination in mind, looping through the Red Grove and starting back toward home. She was hoping someone would know something, would flag her down and explain everything, and even though they didn't, other people were looking too. She passed a few people at a distance, Boog, recognizable by her white-blond hair glowing like a mirage, who was waving from a distance, doing something with her arms. "What?" Luce called out, unsure what faraway sign language Boog was trying on, and Boog waved her arms again, using one hand to cut across her throat, then another to thrust out a spear. "We'll gut the bastard!" she screamed. Luce gave her a thumbs-up—was that the right response?—but pedaled on, not sure how to take Boog's charade.

She passed Naftali and Lee, inseparable, and then a few freshmen lying out on a patch of brittle grass at the edge of the grove. Their bellies were bared, cutout paper shapes laid across their skin to tan hearts and stars right onto their bodies. She remembered the summer her own friends had done that, a few years back. What Luce had wanted, but would never admit, was to be invited when they'd tanned shapes into their skin. She had been too busy with Red Grove duties. And so later, alone, she cut out hearts and stuck them to her forearm, angling it out her window into a beam of sun.

She cut onto a trail that wove through old-growth redwoods. The trees never had to worry about anything—redwoods didn't even age. Time had no effect, caused no browning, no withering, no growing apart from nearby trees. A redwood had no known killing diseases, no predators to eat away at its heart. Its exterior layer of bark is fire-retardant and mold-repellant, a careful shield. These trees, in the right circumstances, might never die.