Chapter 5

June 23, 1997

"WE NEED TO TALK, Goosey." Gloria pushed open the batiks that hung as curtains on Luce's bedroom windows. The morning fog had already burned off, the sun illuminating flecks of dust that swirled like underwater debris. Gloria had not slept, sitting beside her sister all night, writing. Thinking. Cocking her ear toward the window, the front door, past that to the road below, listening for him.

"Stop," Luce said, mumbling, turning toward the wall. "I'm sleeping."

Gloria let out a quick laugh, addressing the window as if she had an audience. "Folks, she is, indeed, a living, breathing teenager." Moose, at the foot of Luce's bed, yawned wide and lifted his head, considering, but thumped it back down on the covers, nuzzling Luce's foot.

"Giddyap, baby," Gloria said.

Luce's eyes were still closed. On the wall surrounding her bed, fat stalks of sunflowers hung upside down to dry. Luce's clothes were mostly folded, tucked into plastic shelves in the small closet. At least she wasn't a slovenly teenager. Three old deck boards had been made into shelves with cinder blocks between them, stuffed with notebooks, books, the biographies of men who had done horrible things; and tucked into the back, spine uncreased, Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul, given to her by Mei the harpist for her birthday last year, Gloria and Luce rolling their eyes together when Mei's back was turned.

Gloria bent over her daughter, twisting a piece of her hair in her fingers. Luce batted her away. "This is serious," Gloria said, not taking it personally. That was rule number one with teenagers: it's not you, it's them. She walked to Luce's closet, rubbed a crocheted dress between her thumb and pointer, cocked her head to consider it.

"Oh my god, fine," Luce said, opening an eye, not trying to hide her annoyance. "Let's talk." She sat up.

Gloria thumbed past a few other items of clothing, stopped on a huge, stained bowling shirt with the name Louise embroidered on the breast. "Where'd this heinous thing come from?"

"I like it."

"God, why is there such an insistence here that ugliness means freedom?"

"Mom—"

"I don't see Aya or Tangerine wearing this kind of stuff."

Luce tilted her head back, banged it against the wall behind her, and closed her eyes. "This is really what you woke me up to talk about?"

Gloria stopped rummaging through Luce's closet and, arms crossed, turned to look at her. "I'm worried for you. All this time creeping in the shadows, all this time by yourself, filling your head with stories of serial killers and tortured women. Honey, it's not what you should be doing at your age."

Luce explained, slowly, like she was talking to a child, that she was doing something very, very important. She was helping the women save their own lives. "To save themselves," she said again, slowly, "which is essentially the plot of all those cheesy musicals you love—"

But there were so many other versions of who Luce could become and what she could do in her life, Gloria said, knowing that she was, once again, not getting through. How to get through? She scraped at a crusty piece of food on a sweatshirt hanging in the closet.

Luce pinched her brow. "I cannot believe we're having this conversation again."

Gloria sighed. What she wanted to tell her daughter, was trying to somehow say, was that she was worried in a new way about this guy, this asshole, who seemed to be blaming his father's death on the Red Grove. She wanted to say, You're a little bird who has never learned to watch out for predators, or, really, You're entirely focused on the apex predators, not the real threat of quotidian anger. "I'm afraid, honey," Gloria said, keeping it in familiar territory, "that your devotion to the Red Grove has limited the options you see for yourself." Luce raised her eyebrows at her mother, annoyed. Gloria recognized that expression, had given it to her own mother. "This," Gloria said, something catching her eye as she turned and reached deeper into Luce's closet. She pulled out a sequined spandex minidress that had been hers when she was younger. "This is exactly what I'm talking about. Most sixteen-year-olds are dying to wear stuff like this. Their lives are full of reasons. Prom. Parties. Dates. Sneaking out to go dancing. It's fun. You could be having fun."

"So to be clear, you woke me up to tell me I should be wearing some cheesy disco dress and sneaking out to share milkshakes with guys named Chad," she said, flopping back down on the bed. She pulled the sheet over her face.

"Luce," Gloria said, softly this time, sitting down at the bottom of the bed. She reached her arm out, hovered it above her daughter's knee. She needed to be more careful, gentle with this daughter of hers. She should lay her hand down on Luce's knee, remind her that her mother was solid, unruffled by teenage angst. It was time for Luce to find her own path, and she could help. "I really think college would be good for you. Give you a fresh start. Strong women don't exist only in the Red Grove. Look at Ruby Wells. I know you love it here, but you don't know anywhere else."

"If you think things are better somewhere else, then you should move, not me."

"Luce—"

"Just go. I'll stay with Gem—"

"Stop," Gloria said, louder than she meant. Now was the time for her to move her hand down, to grasp her daughter, make contact, a good, solid thing in the world, but she left it hovering above a moment longer, and in that space, remembered what it was like to slide into Luce's room years ago, her sister watching from the doorframe as she reached her arm down into the crib, just above Luce's round stomach. How beautiful, that little face, long, dark eyelashes, how vulnerable to be so new in the world. She wouldn't have seen Luce in a month, or a few; how much bigger she'd look, how different. She wouldn't touch that little stomach, didn't want to wake the baby, plus, how hard were you supposed to pat a baby? What would hurt them, what would be comforting? It was a horrible myth that these things come naturally. Instead, she looked at the baby's pursed wet lips, listened to her grunt in her sleep, and kept her hand hovering above the hot little stomach.

"Are we done?" Luce asked, staring at the wall.

It would break her heart, walking out of that room without having touched her daughter. "Why don't we go thrifting together? We can make a day of it. I remember some great spots over in Fairfax." She would show her girl that things were okay out there, not perfect, of course not, nowhere was, but she would draw her girl out of this valley. And this time, she brought her hand down. Not too hard, not too soft.

Luce sat up straighter. Maybe this would work. "I have plans," Luce said, sliding past her mom and out of bed and then out of her sight.

Luce climbed the trail back behind their house up into the open hills, legs strong beneath her and breath barely short even though she was climbing up and up. She was above the coast redwoods, among the low wild oats, filaree, star thistle, a clump of wild hyacinths whose cluster of purple stars gathered at the top of the stalk like a scepter. Earlier in the spring there'd been a patch of ground iris here and, for the brief green of April, clover, which she'd sat amidst and searched, unsuccessfully, for a four-leaf.

She turned up a dirt path that climbed higher, up onto the next big hill. Manzanita and low chaparral bushes by her shins as she climbed, small rocks hitting her toes. She was exhausted by these conversations with her mom. Gloria barging in to her room, acting like she really knew her, knew what was best for her, as if she didn't spend all her concern on Gem, or Roo, or moaning in her bedroom with some guy or another.

A jackrabbit sprinted across the trail ahead. She was above the tree line, where it was hot and dry. All the houses were lower down, on the south, shadier hills rising from the valley, closer to the two-lane road that connected them to the towns beyond. There was no Red Grove town sign to mark when you arrived. She'd been part of the nighttime missions to take down the signs every time the county put one up. Most of her friends had them on their walls.

She kept climbing, feeling the burn in her legs, the sun wicking sweat right off her skin, until she made it to the low stone wall on the crest of the ridge surrounding the valley. She pressed her hand against one of the large rocks in the stone wall. It wasn't that it actually kept anyone in or, more importantly, anyone out, but it felt solid beneath her hand, and it marked the boundary.

There was a game she'd played as a kid. They'd line up beside the trees that marked the boundary, giant trunks that were, by way of warning, wrapped in red yarn. The kids would wrap red string around their throats until they looked like slit-necked corpses and then inch their toes past the boundary. This was no fairy tale; they knew that creeping over the line wouldn't beckon a monster, but deep in their hearts they also had all the stories the women told at the reenactments, and up there, necks ringed in red, they'd repeat the stories to one another, about men with knives hiding behind rocks, about beatings, about fear, about what the teeth of Tamsen's husband's brothers did to the bodies of Tamsen's sisters and the evil that stretched its tendrils across every inch of this earth, except for right here in this one place.

Luce turned, staying on the inside of the wall, down a short gulley and up the next rise. Sticking up out of the earth were massive rock formations, blue sandstone and limestone, rough and ragged and sharp at the edges where it had been chipped away.

A little farther along the boundary, she could see remnants of the original smash shack, so named because once upon a time there had been an actual shack and, inside that shack, giant boulders and small hammers with which to pound at the rocks. Now, though the shack was gone, there were plenty of other rock outcroppings and faces, and always a pile of hammers or chisels. If it was deemed that you needed to "burn off some energy," that was the code, you were sent to the smash shack for a certain amount of time, an hour, a day, and could smash at those rocks as you pleased, then, grunting, sweaty, and covered in dust, carry them to the stone wall bordering the Red Grove. The wall was in constant need of repair, with patches that were never completed, so on any day you might see a few people up there, teenagers often, boys most especially, burning off some of their energy. Sometimes a striation of quartz was revealed, a frozen waterfall inside the rock that, when struck, burst into the air, glittering like sun-pierced falling snow. And sometimes nobody else thought it was time for you to go to the smash shack. People sent themselves.

Nobody else up here at the moment. A little unusual. Luce picked up the closest hammer, kicked aside the smudged safety goggles, and swung. She hit the edge of a rock, but nothing broke, so she swung again, harder, more precise, still nothing, and again, and then a few small pieces chipped off and fell nearby. She thought about her mom's conversation this morning and swung. Bang. The rock chipped away. She thought about Tamsen Nightingale, carrying her own sister's bones on her back, how terrified she'd been, how sure she was going to die, and she swung. Little rocks flew, a bigger chunk, one that hit her shin. No matter.

Birds hid in high branches. Blue-bellied lizards held still in the crevices between stones. She thought about the time she was four or five, not yet asleep, when suddenly there was a shadow over her bed, how she'd peeked one eye open oh so carefully and seen it was her mother, whom she hadn't seen in months, and how she knew she should open both eyes and throw her arms around her mother, how she wanted to, kind of, because she did feel joyful, kind of, but how she also felt mad. And the mad feeling won. She stayed pretend asleep. The shadow did not touch her. And in the morning the person to get her out of bed and brush her tangled hair and make her pancakes and hold her hand while they walked to the bus was not her mother, who was long gone. That person was Gem. She would not let herself think about Gem's face in the hospital, mauve and cracked open and swollen shut.

She swung. Little Luce, good, quiet girl, sitting on the couch, hands folded on her lap, waiting for days, for weeks, for her Gem to get better and come home. She swung harder. Because of course she would. Big chunk of rock cracking off. Little Luce, falling to the tile floor in the school bathroom, weeping and wailing, the school nurse rushing in and Luce saying she was so sick, her brain was bashed, take her to the hospital, and the school nurse pulling her onto her lap. Sweetie, she said, stroking Luce's hair. Oh, sweetie.

Her arms ached and her breath was heavy, and she stopped. Wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. She would not allow these thoughts anywhere but here, where they could be useful. Gem had taught her to take care of other living things beyond all else, and that was exactly, exactly what she spent all her time here doing.

She grabbed one of the nearby baskets and began loading up the smaller rocks she'd broken off. Being here didn't always rid violence from a body, Luce knew, it didn't evaporate out of the brain or the muscles. And it wasn't just men. Women carried violence too. They talked about it in school, how it wasn't only male violence that was harmful out in the world. Luce remembered the slap hard and sharp across the face that she herself had loosed on Roo a few years back. And there were whispers of the violence that sometimes took place in relationships between women. The Red Grove didn't protect against that, which was pretty messed up. Luce kept her ears open for these stories, ready to help devise a plan, shelter a survivor, whatever.

She lumbered with the basket of rocks halfway up a small rise, then dumped it on a part of the wall that could use some shoring up. Back and forth a few times, till she'd cleared the rocks she smashed, till she'd put in the work to draw the line around her home.

It was time to go back. But the sun stung her shoulders with its perfect heat, and rattlesnake grass swished nearby and she thought, What's the harm, just a little bit longer. She stretched, sore already from the hammering, then tightened one of her friendship bracelets that had come loose. She'd made bracelets for Aya and Tangerine, had passed them along after school almost a year ago, something they'd done when they were nine and ten, and since she didn't see them nearly as much these days, she thought it'd be a sweet reminder of the past. But they'd never worn them. They weren't ten anymore.

Up higher, to the barer patches of hill, where she saw a clod of dirt beside a tuft of dried grass, disturbed soil nearby. She crouched. It looked fresh. Mountain lion tracks. She lifted her head and spun quickly, surveying the wildness. Mountain lions attack from behind. They travel long distances, track their prey, bite at the base of its skull. And then they bury it and leave, coming back to feed when they're hungry. Every year, a couple of people in Northern California were killed by mountain lions. Hikers and runners, the occasional small child playing alone at the edge of his yard. The eyes of unseen things tracked people all the time.

Something did catch Luce's eye then—an odd flash of white in the dirt. A surge of cold crept up her hand and arm the closer she came to touching what was in the dirt, the faint sensation that something was pushing her hand, how?

And then there was a sound. A click. No animal makes that sound, though of course, what else could it be? Fingernail in the dirt, scraping dry dirt clods from the buried thing, loosing an edge enough to pry it out. A tingle along her ribs. The thing did not come out easily—she had to use two hands to pull it, as if it were bound to the earth by thick roots. There was a sound, too—a distant buzzing. Or perhaps not so distant. The buzzing of an animal, hunting. Something was happening here. She thought, I'm not afraid. Something is happening, but I am not afraid. Again she looked around her for a lion, but she was alone, except for the click and the buzz and the thing in her hand that felt somehow the smallest bit familiar, like a toy she'd lost when she was a child. It was a bone. She was not afraid, well, a little afraid, yes, and it was a bone, intricately carved, with the figure of a mountain lion carved into the center.

She was overcome with the sense that the trees and hills were watching her carefully, but something else too, something deeper, and she looked down to the hole from which she'd pulled the bone. There were tiny threads in the soil, broken filaments laced through the dirt, white and brown and pink and green, not worms, yet moving, faintly, like a whole network had come together to pulse the bone up to her. Impossible, of course. She laughed to herself, but she could not look away. There was something down there. Something showing her what it wanted her to see.