Chapter_34

So she had made a choice, and her new reality was waiting when she blinked awake. She had sixteen missed calls from Jordan, two from Alice, a cascade of angry texts, and hundreds of likes on Instagram. She was exhausted, having replayed her decision in her dreams, solving an equation over and over again.

She drove the loop from the house to Hank’s farm, into town and then back again. Enough service came through for a text from Jordan to appear—?? So that’s it?—and she didn’t receive any more after that. She continued to post photos to Instagram. The mountains, the guinea hens, the perfectly set table, the shelves that housed records, her new bed frame. Days went by.

Her housemates, meanwhile, were busier than Rosie had anticipated. They were rarely in the same room at the same time. Once, when she awoke in the middle of the night, she overheard Dylan and Hank playing a dice game. She could picture the dice. They were wooden, carved by Dylan, each face was hand-painted red, blue, or yellow. She lay still in her bed with her eyes open, listening to their conversation, the skunk smell of weed filtering beneath her door. “Is she, like... OK?” It was Hank’s voice.

“I think so?” Dylan said. “She seems happy?”

“But she hasn’t told Jordan? What does he think?”

The dice rolled. Dylan coughed. “No clue. I’m sure he’s spiraling.”

“Do you think he could just show up here unannounced?”

“He’s definitely that type. He thinks he owns her.”

“Well, if he does, we can just crack open one of Lark’s jars of pickles,” Hank said. “That’ll repel anyone.”

“Part of me does like what she’s doing to him. Is that bad?”

“His mom seemed nuts. When she came over for dinner? Do you think she’s ever seen a trans person before?”

Rosie wanted to vanish.

“I know,” Dylan said.

“And is she in love with him? The way she was looking at him...”

“Rosie?”

“No, his mom!”

“Totally. And it’s definitely mutual!” Dylan said, and Hank slapped the table.

“Shh,” Dylan said through her own laughter.

“Could she have picked a more complicated way to leave him?”

“I think it made sense to her,” Dylan croaked from the top of an inhale. “I think she wanted to undo something.”

“Remind me again how she pitched it to you?”

“She told me she thought she might be pregnant. Like, it was just a feeling she had. But it was still too early for a test to tell her.”

“Right,” Hank said.

“Hold on. Let me just make sure...” A moment later, Rosie’s bedroom door creaked open. She closed her eyes. The oxygen vanished from the room.

Then the click of the door closing and dice again. “You were saying.”

“Right. So she asked me to buy Jordan’s sample and inseminate her. She said she liked the idea that I would be, like...”

“What?”

“The parent,” Dylan said. “She liked the idea that I could be the parent.”

“What? Like, legally? Does it work like that?”

“Conceptually, I think?”

“And you’d adopt the baby?”

“We didn’t get that far.”

Dice rolled.

“Maybe I should have discouraged her,” Dylan said finally. “Or maybe I shouldn’t have done it at all.”

“Why did you?”

“I thought it was wild. A little hot! Kind of affirming. And honestly, I liked the idea of messing with him.”

“Jordan.”

“Yeah. Even if he never finds out. Nobody knows who got her pregnant. Not me, not him, not Rosie.”

Hank began tallying up the points. “Best two out of three?”

Rosie closed her eyes, her heart skidding. She held a hand to her belly. She fantasized about stepping outside her bedroom and saying something to them. But what? As a child she had once overheard her mother on a date, describing Rosie: She’s never satisfied with what she has. She has no idea how good she has it. She’s just like her father. She allowed herself to think about what Jordan might be doing in Connecticut. She pictured him on his weight bench, angrily thrusting a barbell toward the ceiling.

Winter showed no signs of relenting, even as February pushed into March. Rosie had helped Hank install heaters in the coop, and the chickens huddled for warmth, persecuted by the cold. In the evenings they lit bonfires, played cards, and set off fireworks in the frozen field across from the general store. Dylan’s full attention was rare, but when Rosie had it, it felt like an anointment. Rosie had tried, once, to sleep with Dylan, but Dylan politely explained that this was no longer compatible with her relationship. “It’s not a reflection of our connectedness, though,” she said to Rosie, which only confused her more. The house was still half-furnished aside from the living and dining rooms, which were as perfect as showrooms. Lark had hung a flag beside the front door, and Rosie understood now she had been working on it for months, all the while waiting for Jordan and Rosie to move out. White and indigo-dyed triangles overlapped to reveal an intricate floral pattern.

When the armchairs in the living room were occupied, Rosie lay down on her bed with her door closed. She watched the reality show on her laptop, the volume low enough that no one would hear. It seemed that the most doomed couples agreed to marry each other at the altar and the most compatible ones balked. She wondered if Jordan was watching the finale without her. She opened his last text to her, ?? So that’s it?, and stared at it until the screen dimmed, then went black.

As the days passed, she watched Dylan build a couch, shaping each piece many times over, filming the process on her iPhone. Sometimes she undid the work just to redo it for the camera. Every surface was covered with tools. The demolition of the downstairs bathroom had become one of her most popular TikToks, and it took a full week for the plaster dust to settle. Rosie found it everywhere, even upstairs, in drawers, in books, in her nostrils. Dylan had left the toilet hooked up, but she’d ripped out the sink and disconnected the power, so Rosie had to pee in front of Dylan’s ring light and wash her hands in the kitchen sink.

When the nausea was bad, she moved a pillow to the bathroom floor and pressed her face against the cold wall tiles. In those moments, she pulled out her phone and scrolled through Dylan’s TikToks, watching the walls of her house come down in fifteen-second intervals. The videos soothed her, even as she avoided the real-life mess. Hundreds of thousands of likes. Endless fawning comments. Rosie wavered between pride and irritation. Packages arrived for Dylan—DeWalt, Gorilla, Carhartt—and Rosie brought them inside. Sometimes Dylan took walks in the woods with the child and invited Rosie to join them. Other times she left without any notice and Rosie did not know where she had gone or when she’d be back.

Lark would leave too, often for days at a time, to attend workshops on obscure, specific topics: bee pollen, intermittent napping, cocoons.

One afternoon, Dylan called for Rosie and she came out of her bedroom, delirious from one of the void-like naps that had become a fixture of each day. She had a duffel slung over her shoulder. “Hey, Rosie,” she said, smiling. “Sorry to wake you.”

“That’s all right,” Rosie said. She waited for an invitation.

“I was wondering if we could take your truck,” Dylan said. “It has slightly more room than mine.”

“Who’s we?”

“Oh, me, Sasha, and Callie. We’re gonna sleep in their yurt tonight. I could leave you my truck.”

Rosie peered outside. Sasha and Callie lingered outside with their own backpacks, waiting for Rosie to agree. Justin was already in her truck, happily panting.

“OK,” Rosie said. “I’m not sure where my keys—”

“I got them,” Dylan said. “You’ll be good here?”

“Where’s Lark?”

“Not sure,” Dylan said. “At a silent retreat, I think. And Hank is visiting his girlfriend.”

“OK,” Rosie said. She hugged herself for warmth.

“Great.” Dylan kissed Rosie on the cheek. “Call if you need anything. Although my reception will probably be garbage out there.”

“Out where?” Rosie said.

“The Catskills.”

“Should I know where, in case there’s an emergency?”

“Nah,” Dylan said. “There won’t be.”

Alone in the house, Rosie opened her text history with Jordan, scrolling back further this time, to before the moment she decided not to follow him to Connecticut. Her nightstand was in a cube somewhere, so she set her phone on the floor and tried to channel her anxiety into cleaning the house. She found that although everything looked nice, nothing worked well. Dylan’s vintage floor lamp zapped her when she switched it on. The vacuum cleaner was loud, smelly, and bad at sucking up dust. The straw broom left streaks of gunk on the floor. Justin’s hair had gathered beneath the sofa, between every cushion, and inside every corner of the house. Rusty, uncategorizable metal objects were scattered across every surface. Canvas bags hung off chairs, full of errant tools, dead pens, padlocks without keys, and loose batteries.

Rosie’s nausea was matched only by an intense craving for salt. She took everything out of the fridge: Dylan’s duck prosciutto, smoked salmon that made her gag, and jar after jar of the beets, cabbage, and jalape?os she’d helped Lark pickle. But she didn’t want beets. She wanted a regular, pickled cucumber, preferably the kind with artificial yellow coloring—a cold, crisp, salty dill pickle. It was getting late, but the general store would be open for another hour.

She climbed into Dylan’s truck. The engine screeched and sputtered, almost turned over, and went quiet. She tried again, but this time, nothing. She called Dylan, but it rang out, and her voicemail box was full.

Truck won’t start, she texted. Can you remind me what you did last time?

She watched her phone try and fail to deliver the text. She tried to send it again, holding it up toward the moon. She opened the hood of the truck and looked inside, attempting to remember what Dylan had done months before, on the day of their hike, when the truck wouldn’t start. But the engine was a puzzle she could not solve. When she called Dylan again, it went straight to voicemail.

??, she texted.

Freezing, she returned inside. She opened her phone. Dylan had posted a new video, and Rosie watched it on repeat, frame by frame. Dylan lighting a fire, cooking a sausage over the open flame, mapping the constellations, drinking whiskey from a flask. Finally, a text.

Did u check the glove box for ignition coils? Think I have a few left.

Ignition coils?Rosie wrote. She waited, but no response came. She popped the hood again, but in the dusky light, it was impossible to see anything. She googled ignition coils and scrolled through the photo results of parts that looked like basketball pumps. She let out a hollow cry and trudged back to the house to get her heavy coat and boots. She was determined to find a pickle, even if she had to walk three miles to the general store, which she did, the wind pushing sideways against her as she navigated along the side of the wide country road, her boots chafing against her ankles.

It was better than she could have anticipated. The crisp, salty snap, the artificial juice—she made her way through the entire jar as she walked home, her teeth chattering, her joints stiff, her fingers numb, snow flying horizontally into her face.

She almost didn’t notice when, returning to the house, something crunched underfoot. Clusters of tempered glass were strewn around the porch. The kitchen door was smashed. She froze, the jar in her hand.

“Hello?” she said timidly. She took a careful step forward, cringing at the sound of the broken glass. Slowly she drew open the door and stepped inside.

“Hello?” she said again. A sharp, vinegar smell hit her. The kitchen lights buzzed faintly. For a moment, she thought she was looking at blood on the floor, but she realized it was just the pickled beets. All the jars she’d pulled out of the fridge were smashed, their liquid pooling on the floor. The cured meat was gone. The baking cabinet hung open, ransacked. Sugar was everywhere.

She looked around in a panic and said the words she’d learned in an elementary school outdoor education field trip: “Hey, bear!”

She picked up a pot and a spoon and made a drumming sound. “Hey, bear!” she cried, making herself as big as she could, turning on every light in the house. “Hey, bear,” she yelled, moving from one room to the next. “Hey, bear!” Every shelf was alive. Every lamp had teeth. “Hey, bear,” she shouted, drawing her phone out of her pocket, dropping it, then picking it up again, an invisible splinter of glass pushing into her thumb. She could not help but picture a baby crawling across the floor, palms and knees against glass. The brine from the pickles still lingered in her mouth: the taste of something made in a factory, something vacuum-sealed by a perfect machine, engineered for pleasure and safety. She brought her phone to her ear. The phone rang once.

“Rosie,” Jordan said, “Jesus Christ.”