“I’ll take care of this while you look for the kids,” the old man tells him.
Ten minutes later Tom finds Moonbeam and Mushroom playing in the dirt behind the barn. He takes them to the station wagon.
With a bowie knife, the old man has cut off four fingers on Alicia’s left hand—the four fingers that scratched the young man and got his DNA on them.
He finds a jerrican of gasoline and trails gas all through the farmhouse. He wipes the jerrican with a handkerchief, goes to the kitchen sink, and pours himself a glass of water. He drinks the water and wipes the glass clean of prints.
He steps through the screen door, holds the door open with his foot, lights a book of matches, and throws it onto the kitchen floor.
A line of scarlet flame races across the linoleum.
The old man joins Tom back at the station wagon.
They drive away from the commune, the old man at the wheel, Tom in the back with the kids.
They don’t meet any other cars on the narrow road that leads away from the farm—which is fortunate for everyone.
Tom looks through the rear window to see the farmhouse erupting in flames.
They drive for forty minutes, until they encounter a reservoir. The old man stops the station wagon, gets out, cleans both pistols and the bowie knife with a handkerchief.
He adds the bowie knife to the paper bag containing Alicia’s fingers. He pokes a hole in the bag and throws the bag and both pistols into the glassy water.
They sink immediately.
Three sets of ripples in the pond intersect briefly like the triple spiral one finds at the entrance to passage graves in Neolithic Europe.
The spirals fade and the black water is still again.
“Come on,” the old man says. “Let’s go.”
44
A blizzard. Cold. The bundles at her feet are birds who have frozen and fallen from the trees. Snow stings her face but she can barely feel it. She is here and not here. She is watching herself in a cinema of confession.
All she’s trying to do is get back to the house from the mailbox. But she can’t see through the white translucent depths of Old Point Road.
She doesn’t want to take a wrong turn and wander into the marsh. She walks gingerly in her bedroom slippers and her robe.
Why is she so underdressed? Underprepared? Unready?
The marsh waits for her to fill an absence. You owe the void a life because you got your daughter back.
On the water ducks raise an alarm. Something is lurking out there on the edge of the tidal basin.
The wind swirls the snow in front of her. What possessed her to come out in weather like this?
The whiteness darkens into the shape of a creature. A man. The curve in the hood of his coat makes it seem like he has horns.
Maybe he does have horns. Maybe he has the body of a man and the face of a bull.
He comes closer.
No, it is a man. He is wearing a long black coat and he is carrying a gun. The gun is pointed at her chest. “I’m looking for Kylie O’Neill,” he says.
“She’s not home—she, she, she went to New York,” Rachel stutters.
The man raises the gun…
She wakes with a start.
The bed’s empty. Pete is gone. The house is quiet. She’s had this dream before. Variations on a theme. You don’t need to be a genius to interpret this nightmare: You are in debt. You will always be in debt. You owe. Once you are on The Chain, you are on forever. And if you even think about trying to emancipate yourself, the blowback will come for you.
It’s like her cancer.
It will always be there, lurking in the background, for the rest of her life. For the rest of all their lives.
Cancer.
Yeah.
She looks at the pillow, and sure enough, there are a few dozen brown and black hairs and—oh, how charming—quite a few gray ones now too.
When she’d gone to see her oncologist on that fateful Tuesday morning, Dr. Reed had immediately sent her for an MRI. The results were sufficiently concerning for Dr. Reed to recommend a surgical intervention that afternoon.
It was the same cream-colored room at Mass. General.
The same kind Texan anesthetist.
The same no-nonsense Hungarian surgeon.
Even the same Shostakovich symphony playing in the background.
“Honey, everything’s going to be just dandy. I’m going to count down from ten,” the anesthetist said.
Come on, who says “just dandy” anymore, Rachel thought.
“Ten, nine, eight…”
The surgery was declared a success. She would “require only one cycle of adjuvant chemotherapy,” which was easy for Dr. Reed to say because she didn’t have to go through it. She didn’t have to have the poison dripped into her veins.
Still, once every two weeks for four months is something Rachel can handle. Nothing is all that terrible now that her little girl is back again.
She brushes the hairs off the pillow and the bad dream from her mind. She can hear Kylie upstairs above her in the shower. Kylie used to sing in the shower. She doesn’t do that anymore.
Rachel pulls back the blinds and picks up the mug of coffee Pete left for her by the bed. It looks like a nice morning. She’s surprised to see that there’s no snow. The dream felt so real. The bedroom faces east toward the tidal basin. She takes a sip of coffee, slides the glass doors open, and goes out onto the deck. It’s crisp and cool, and the mudflats are full of wading birds.
She sees Dr. Havercamp walking through the dunes in front of the house. He waves and she waves back. He disappears behind a large beach plum bush from which this island and the one in New York got its name. The beach plums are ripe now. They’d made jars of preserved plums last fall, selling them at the farmers’ market. She and Kylie split the proceeds. Vineland Jam Corporation, Kylie had called it, writing that on the homemade labels. Kylie had loved the fact that dangerous piratical Vikings had maybe made it as far south as Plum Island. Those were days when you could long for danger from a place of safety.
Rachel tightens the belt on the robe and goes into the living room. “Honey, do you want me to make you breakfast?” she calls to her daughter.
“Toast, please,” Kylie says from somewhere upstairs.
Rachel pads into the kitchen and puts two slices of bread in the toaster.
“Happy Thanksgiving,” someone says behind her.
“Shit!” she says, spinning around and holding up the bread knife.
Stuart comically puts his hands in the air.
“Stuart, I’m so sorry, I didn’t know you were over,” Rachel says.
“You can put the knife down now, Mrs. O’Neill,” Stuart replies, faking terror.
“Sorry about the S-word too. Don’t tell your mother.”
“It’s fine. I might have heard that word once or twice before in various, um, contexts.”
“Would you like some toast?”
“No, thanks. I just came by to say hi to Kylie before you guys leave.”
Rachel nods and makes some toast for Stuart anyway. She and Kylie and Pete are going to Boston for Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving was only two days after a chemo Tuesday, so Marty had stepped into the breach and invited them all to his place for the holiday.
It’s OK. Everything is OK.
Rachel makes two more slices of toast, puts them on a plate.