Chapter 4

June 22, 1997

THEY WERE EATING DINNERwhen Gloria got the call. Black bean tacos. Roo recounting his newt's dream from the night before to Gem. Luce, Gloria, and Roo surrounded her, their plates on the small table in Gem's room, Moose lying beneath the table, patiently waiting for a scrap to fall. They liked to keep Gem company, so they did whatever they could in her room. Most people in her state couldn't be left alone at all, but Gem was always fine, like the fakirs Gloria had read about who existed for years without food or water, or buried in a tomb underground. Gem had a feeding tube, and they bathed her in love, but something else seemed to be the real source of her nourishment. Luce thought it was the Red Grove.

Others fed Gem love too. Mei came Thursdays to play the harp. Sharon and Dee showed up once a month to trim her hair, massage floral oils into her legs and arms. Bob performed Reiki. Juan came by sporadically to read aloud to her, mostly deep space stuff and the occasional biography—Tina Turner's most recently. Of all the things Gloria questioned about the Red Grove, there was no getting around the generosity of this network.

And then the kitchen phone rang. It was a seeker Gloria regularly helped who worked as a nurse at the closest hospital, and she'd promised to keep Gloria informed. So here it was. The man was dead. Gloria wondered, for a moment, whether she could keep his death a secret from her kids and the community. She didn't want to add any fuel to the frenzy. She hated the reenactments. Retelling the stories of violence against women normalizes it, even glorifies it, she argued, or tried to argue, but nobody wanted to hear it. At the reenactment the night before, she'd tucked far into the back, present because she'd known that Luce was nervous, but determined not to participate.

But no—too many people already knew about the seeker. There could be no silencing of the news. So what Gloria needed was a cigarette and a fuck, in that order, and not to be reprimanded once they heard he was dead, for bringing this man to the Red Grove in the first place.

As Gloria told the kids, Roo climbed off his chair and knelt down on the rug, clasping his hands together. Where had he learned this? Roo said he thought they should have a funeral for the man, that they should bury him in their yard, that he was feeling very sad because he was a nice man, wasn't he, hadn't he been especially nice?

"Not especially," Gloria said, but seeing the wrinkle in her little boy's forehead, she caught herself. "You're right, Roo. We can have our own little funeral." Roo wanted to know if it could be now, always in a rush toward feeling things, her Roo, reminded her of that line from e. e. cummings, "since feeling is first." That was her boy. That was not her girl. She could not wait, could not wait, for Luce to no longer be a teenager.

Gloria said they needed a few days to plan the funeral and think about it, and would Roo mind being in charge? He nodded gravely. And then she tried to put the whole thing out of her mind.

But later that night, Boog swung by to deliver hand salve she'd just jarred, and oh, also, had they heard anything about the man? "How extremely terrible," she said, rubbing salve into Gem's hands, and did Gloria think it might possibly have something to do with her sister's abilities? No, Gloria did not. And so Boog ran home and returned with a ham casserole she'd frozen for just such an occasion, she said, the way they did it down in Alabama, and there would be no fussing about it, and when Gloria protested that there really was no need, that they weren't in mourning, Boog had pulled her into a hug and, patting her back, said, "I know, I know."

And then Juan was there to help set a trap for the rat that had been sneaking around their kitchen at night and he said that he knew Gloria sometimes developed, uh, intimate relations with the seekers, a question with a hint of jealousy, Gloria thought, and was the man who died one of them? "Juan, sweetie," she'd said, "it's none of your fucking business," and he blushed, nodded in agreement. A couple days of these blame-laced questions, and she was desperate to close the door on everyone and go back to the thing she was burning with lately, the thing she had been hearing from her sister.

But the phone rang the next day and the voice identified herself to Gloria as the journalist Ruby Wells. Gloria knew the name; Ruby had one of those faces you see on the sides of buses with a stern half smile, arms crossed, all business. Luce was a devoted fan, always following Ruby's stories with rapt attention, like the one on sexual abuse inside the girls' school a few towns over, or the man let out on bail after his third wife in a row was hospitalized for head injuries, or the woman who killed her abusive boyfriend. It had been a story reported by Ruby Wells years back that first introduced Gloria to the Red Grove.

Ruby was calling, she said, because she'd been contacted by the son of the man who'd died in their house. Gloria's neck went cold. "He thinks there's something more going on," Ruby said. "Something else that caused his father's heart to fail. Do you have a comment on that?"

Did she have a comment? She would like to comment that it was hard every single day to wake up and make breakfast for her children and change her sister's diaper, make dinner, engage in small talk with visitors, bathe the dog, and not get in her car and never return, that's what she thought, a fucking miracle she wasn't waving her scarf over her head in a farewell tribute as she drove for the final time over the Golden Gate Bridge. Instead, she swallowed, explaining that there was no story here. Nothing strange, just pure bad luck. She had been very sorry that the man died, he seemed nice, clearly in pain over the death of his wife. End of story.

"You should know that his son, Bobby, is really angry," Ruby said.

"Angry at what?" Gloria wanted to know. "And don't start telling me it's one of the stages of grief, because first of all, the lady who came up with those five stages actually wrote them about the five stages a dying person goes through, not a grieving person. And second, the poor man had heart disease, and—"

"No, not that," Ruby said, exhaling into the phone. A smoker. "It's more about you, actually. Not really your psychic, uh, stuff. It's your community. He thinks the Red Grove is the problem."

Gloria looked at her children in the living room. Roo was crouched low over his ant farm, and Luce was sprawled across the futon, reading, filling her head with shotguns and pantyhose used for strangulation and the discarded bodies of prostitutes. When Gloria had tried to have a respectful, reasonable conversation with her—treating her like an adult, as she requested—to express that obsessively reading about murderers might be making her more afraid than she needed to be, this stuff was pretty dark, her daughter had said that as soon as the news stopped filling with stories of women murdered and beaten by men, she'd stop needing to know about it. Gloria thought Luce's obsession was really a way for her daughter to feel she knew enough about the very worst, so that what had happened to Gem wasn't singular, so she wasn't the only person who had to carry on with this particular kind of a broken heart. It wasn't enough that Gloria and Roo were here with her, living on. Luce wanted to believe that the whole world was barely surviving.

The man thought the Red Grove was the problem? So did Gloria. Because the longer they lived here, the more Gloria realized that any isolated community, no matter how noble its intentions, restricted you. It made the world too small. That was the truth, though she could not, would not, say it.

"Thinking the Red Grove is the problem is stupid," Gloria said. She wasn't dumb enough to stoke the fire.

"Maybe," Ruby said. She took a long inhale. "But I've been wondering about that place for a long time myself. One of my first stories was about the Red Grove, and even back then I knew something was different about it. A childhood friend of mine moved out there, and I never heard from her again. But I want to understand it. Let me interview you, Gloria. Nobody wants their story told by someone else, someone who gets it wrong."

"I know this tactic—try to become my friend, pretend you're empowering me. It's not going to work."

"You could tell me, in your own words, why this is where you've chosen to raise your daughter."

"See? You're very good."

"Is it a place," Ruby said, as if they were two old friends, "where I should move with my own daughter?"

Gloria tried to imagine hard-hitting Ruby Wells wrestling a toddler into socks, soothing a baby whose temperature wouldn't go down in the middle of the night. What would it be like to go home to your daughter after spending your days reporting on the worst things that happened? She looked again at her children. She thought about Roo, back when he was as big as a cat, how floppy, how smiley. She tried to conjure up Luce when she was a baby, but she couldn't hold on to any image.

"What's his son saying exactly?" Gloria asked. People said nonsense about the Red Grove, but because they tried to stay out of the spotlight and didn't usually correct the record, the stories built up, then dissipated.

"It's the note," Ruby said. "He's convinced it shows willful intent to let him die, a kind of revenge-on-men plot. I am interested in whether that was your intention, or if not, why you wrote it?"

There was not a single thing she could come up with to make sense of what Ruby was saying. "I don't know about any note," Gloria said.

"I already have a copy, so there's no use pleading ignorance."

"Would you mind reading me what it says?"

Ruby took a drag, quiet a moment, considering. "Who was the note intended for?"

"Forget it," Gloria said, anger flaring. "There was no note. Nothing to tell, no story. Goodbye." She hung up.

She kept her eyes on Luce, sprawled on the couch. There were these small yellow birds called palila, with black stripes on their faces, as cute as can be, who lived on one slope of volcanic soil on one side of a mountain on one island in Hawaii, and they were almost extinct. Eaten by cats, mostly. There were millions of feral cats on the island. But the problem wasn't the cats per se; the problem was the birds themselves. Palila had evolved and lived for millions of years on the island without cats, and, moreover, without any land predators at all. They did not have instinctual fear. No flight response. They just hopped around on the ground as a cat approached, thinking themselves impervious to harm.

She looked over at her children one more time, trying to convince herself not to be rattled by the call. But she was. A man, thinking they had let his father die? Or worse, somehow hastened it, so sure of his anger that he'd invented a note as fake proof. She did not like any of it. They were not prepared for something like that. Her daughter's head was so full of serial killers that she might not know when to use common sense to stay safe. Her daughter, the little yellow bird.

Gloria fell into the chair beside Gem's bed, laid her head down on her sister's stomach. Soft lavender scent on the sheet. She closed her eyes. Clicked her tongue up against the roof of her mouth. Waited, listened. Clicked. Scooped one dry, limp hand into her palm, felt a sudden seasickness. What was her sister telling her? But there was nothing else. "You got me into this mess," Gloria whispered. "You tell me how to get us out."

Outside the window, a redwood groaned, scaring a squirrel off. Needles quivered even without wind. Long before Gloria and her family were in the Red Grove, before Una arrived, before Tamsen Nightingale, before any Europeans arrived on the continent, a thousand years before the beginning of the Christian calendar, around the time of the Parthenon's construction in Greece, this particular redwood tree on the hill outside the window had begun to grow. Its bark was deep red, fibrous, flame-retardant, though fires sometimes did catch a part of the tree and open up hollow caves in the trunk, wounds so large that herders used them as livestock pens. This big, this ancient, and their pine cones, filled with seeds that can unfurl into new redwoods, were no bigger than Gloria's thumb.

"How worried should I be about this guy?" Gloria asked her sister. She brushed the hair away that had been stuck to Gem's forehead, leaned in close. Every piece of her life was in the Red Grove because of her sister. How deeply she was entwined. How stuck.

She clicked again. Waited for a message, her face hovering above her sister's. Gloria would never forget the night they arrived in the Red Grove. She was at the helm of a vehicle full of people she was responsible for: a kid, a baby, her twin sister, propped up carefully, with pillows, in the back. They'd gotten permission to move right into a house, none of the transitional apartment in Heartwood nonsense, though the instructions she'd been given on the phone were as vague as she worried they might be in a place like this: drop down into the valley and take your first left as the trees get dense, another left at the boulder with quartz striations, right at the buckeye tree to the top of the hill, past the cluster of yurts, up the narrow winding road, and yours is the last house at the top, as deep within the community—as protected—as can be.

And then, like in some artsy, horny horror flick, all these half-naked women were walking around at night. The moonlight cast their faces blue-silver, and the massive trees hid yowling animals. Gloria rolled down her window. These were not the women of the fashion magazines she'd grown up reading. One woman right alongside the road waved. Gloria looked at her: saggy-titted with no bra, letting her gray hairs run frizzy, her legs grow long, dark hair like a dog. Don't be so judgy, Gloria thought. God, but she couldn't stop looking at the woman's stretch marks and scars, and then another woman coming up beside the first, completely naked, what in the hell, her big bush erupting from her crotch and growing down the insides of her thighs, the cellulite on her legs bared for anyone to notice, jiggly as the sea and cratered as the moon.

Well, not everyone was like that. She spotted a few women with lean, tight bodies and buoyant breasts and cascades of perfect hair, Renaissance goddesses.

Gem had been talking to people in the community on and off for years, since they first saw Ruby Wells's news story about the Red Grove, but she had never actually made the move. Gloria kept telling her sister that a place like the Red Grove was ridiculous. Unnecessary. It washed her in shame to think about how she'd berated her sister for even considering a place whose currency was the fear of men. No, Gem would say, you're missing the point. It's not fear of men, it's absolute strength of women, of nature. And in response, Gloria, fool that she was back then, had told Gem that she just needed to meet the right guy and had signed her up for speed dating.

But once Gem was unable to make the final choice to come live here, Gloria called the phone number scrawled in her sister's slanted cursive. She had so many questions for Una. Did all the rumors—satanic cult, lesbian commune, witches, freaks, lunatics—bother them?

They were very happy with what they were, how they had become that way, Una told Gloria. They were no drain on local services—they took care of their own. Food pantry in Heartwood, big room of goods people could leave and take and trade. Some people had jobs outside and some didn't, they could do what they wanted. Had no police or jail—no need—and no criminals, none of the kind that mattered, were allowed in, not that they could do their bad deeds here, anyway. That was the thing about this place. A woman could step out onto her front porch wearing whatever she wanted, no bra, short dress, who cared, and have no worry that someone might mistake her body for something they could take or touch without permission. A woman could drink a neighbor's home-brew beer all day and night—cup after cup, until she was tripping over and didn't know her own name—pass out drunk on his bed in her skivvies, and wake in the morning worried only about the hangover. She would not find herself plagued by flashbacks of what he'd done in the night. She would not have to check her panties for goop. There was no wasted time wondering if something bad had happened. So the women had time for other things, daydreaming and growing roses and playing fiddle and sleeping and smoking and a relationship with darkness and solitude that was not rooted in potential danger.

And your sister, Una had said. I'm so sorry about what has happened to her. I can't promise anything, of course, but miraculous recoveries have taken place in the Red Grove. It is a very special place.

Gloria squeezed her eyes shut, leaning against the hospital wall, sticky, citrus-scented disinfectant, holding on to that dimmest of hopes. And she said that she had a baby and a girl, a daughter, who was eight, and what was it like to raise a girl there.

A girl could rise from her sleepless bed in the darkest hour of night, Una said, and walk into the forest, no flashlight, no fear. She could hear the snap of a twig and not startle. And if her nighttime walk took her climbing up into the golden hills, all the way to the community's boundary, well then that's when she might double back.

But a woman would not have to waste the glorious, twinkling starlight on planning an escape route or keeping watch for a potential weapon. And if, on those rare occasions where a man in the community said something rude, something she didn't like, she could tell him he was full of shit. She could yell at him. She could ignore him. She could have a pleasant, rational conversation with him. She was not afraid of his anger. There was no need to smile or fake laugh at his jokes if they were not funny. If he was boring, she could be bored. There was no need to feign interest.

There was no need to navigate his potential violence as she moved through the world, and so she moved through it as her whole, singular, unflinching self.

This is what we're offering, Una had explained to Gloria. A place where a girl was not protected or coddled, was not taught to be afraid. Where a girl could just be a human.

But now, eyes closed, creases of skin across her forehead damp from the June day, Gloria looked at her sister, listening, waiting, and yes, there it was. A click. Yes, she could hear her. It was happening again.

Gloria moved quickly, grabbing the notebook and pen hidden beneath the bed, and opened to a fresh page, scribbling immediately, not wanting to miss anything. "How did you learn this story?" she asked when Gem paused her clicks for a moment, but Gem kept on. She leaned in toward her sister. "Okay, okay, go on," Gloria said. And she wrote.

She had been writing for an hour when a sound pulled her out: in the kitchen, the ringing phone. As familiar as a jay's song, yet this time it startled her. Maybe it would be Una, she told herself, or a seeker. Hiding the notebook as quickly as she could, she hollered for her children not to pick up, but when she got to the kitchen, Luce was already on the phone.

"Last house at the top of Buckeye Drive," she said just as her mother called out "Wait." Luce squinted at Gloria, mouthed what? God, Luce was ignorant. Gloria pulled at a cuticle on one of her fingers. Maybe her hunch was wrong and this was someone new, someone regular. Maybe whatever worry she was picking up from her sister wasn't about this at all.

"Sure," Luce said into the phone. Then: "It's for you," to her mom, passing the receiver, raised eyebrows, this face her daughter gave her so often, like she was looking at something disgusting, roadkill, rotten fish.

Gloria held the phone to her chest and waited for Luce to leave the kitchen. "Hello?"

"Listen," the voice said. A man. Youngish. "I've been suspicious of your man-hating commune bullshit for years," he said, and Gloria started to speak, but he barreled on. It was exactly who she feared it would be. "And I found the note, which proved me right," but she had no idea what he meant by that—a note? Maybe something his father wrote before he came to them, she wondered, but he was still yammering on. "If I'd had any idea my dad was coming there, I'd have kicked his ass, some feminist revenge bullshit, but I guess I'm gonna have to come there myself—"

Gloria heard nothing else. She slammed down the phone.