In the Next World, Maybe
She got off the train at Hudson and her father was there, tall and resigned, his long hands unraveling the brim of his sun hat as he held it in front of him. She had wondered if she would recognize him right away, but of course she did. The lines in his face had become grooves, and he was baked by the sun, lankier and more muscular than she remembered. She had been ten when she last saw him. Now, at sixteen, she lensed in immediately on the deep hollows around his eyes, the pitted surface of his face, the volume of his wiry salt-and-pepper beard. All around her, people descended from Amtrak cars, greeted those who had come to retrieve them, and were whisked away.
“Charlotte,” he said, and from his careful tone she realized that he had been studying her in the same way, letting all her differences rise to the surface.
“Lot, now,” she said. She wanted to start off by asserting herself—it felt important, since she had been sent there in disgrace.
“Charlotte,” he repeated. They stared at each other. She had imagined his face for so long, and now here it was, and it was different. Who had she been imagining? He turned away, gesturing for her to follow. She looked at how his knuckles had gnarled, how the skin of his hands had become yellow and thick with blisters that had peeled and then firmed over. She knew then that she desperately wanted to impress him, though it had been years since she had cared what an adult thought.
The farm was on a plot of land an hour north. Once they pulled out of Hudson, her father drove with his eyes narrowed against the sun and the land unspooled around them: lush planes of farmland dotted by red barns and the blinding silver of grain silos; thick patches of woodland that consumed the fields and coalesced into a wall of green, through which the sun bit intermittently; wooden fencing that turned woodland back into grassland and produced endless enclosures of cows and horses and pigs neighbored next to each other.
She thought he would ask her about the Incident at school—this was what her mother had taken to calling it, in an attempt to avoid the ugly specifics. She didn’t know how much her mother had told him. In her favor: the fact that he and her mother rarely spoke, and to reveal what Lot had done would have been to admit her own failure as a mother. Not in Lot’s favor: the fact that she had not seen her father in six years, and to send Lot there for the summer would have required some explanation. But he didn’t ask. The truck was silent for the first ten minutes, and then he gestured to the radio dial and said, “You can DJ,” and she turned the dial to the first station that stuck, Top Tens. It was June of 2002, and Nelly always seemed to be playing. She inhaled the old leather seats, air thick with pollen, and let her body relax. She had protested when her mother decided to send her away, but the protest had been for show only, and she hadn’t kept it up long for fear that her mother would change her mind. She wanted a whole new place to be. She wanted to disappear.
They had driven for a long time when her father asked, “Anything you need before we pull off the main road?”
She was startled out of a half-doze. “Need?”
“Advil, toothbrush.” He shrugged. “Tampons.”
Lot had never imagined that tampons were a thing men knew about, and it had never occurred to her that her father would say the word with his mouth. “No,” she said, flushing deeply. “That’s okay.”
The road that snaked off into the trees was hard-packed dirt, and it turned and twisted for much longer than she expected before the land opened back out, and there it was: an enclave of wooden structures. A large red barn, a low two-story house with faded gray siding, a smaller one-story cabin painted mustard yellow. Chickens had loosed themselves across the semi-circle of gravel that made up the driveway, and they ran squawking out of the way as her father pulled the truck in. An old beagle lay in the sun; it lifted its face in their direction as its tail thumped the dust.
As the door to the house opened and two women emerged—one drying her hands on an apron, the other carrying a mixing bowl—Lot realized that she had never imagined her father’s world after he had left her. She had imagined him, yes, but she had not worked to construct an image of his new life, to populate it with others. She stared at the two women, jaw-dropped, through her half-rolled-down window.
“Who’re they?”
Her father, pulling his keys out of the ignition, glanced. “That’s Gina, that’s Shelly.”
“But who are they?”
He looked at her. His face was expressionless but poised on the edge of a new thought.
After a moment he said, “Come meet them all.”
“Them all …?”
But he was already opening his door, getting out. He lifted a hand and the woman with the apron waved back. She was maybe twenty-five—she had a wide-open, guileless face—and she smiled at Lot as if they already knew each other. The one with the bowl was closer to Lot’s age. She didn’t smile.
Her father made his same beckoning gesture, and the women approached. He repeated both of their names, and Lot knew no more than she had known before.
“It’s lovely to meet you,” Shelly said. She was the older one, and she took charge. “How was the train?”
“Fine,” Lot said. Her eyes found Gina again. Gina was staring straight at her, giving her nothing.
“We can show you where you’ll be sleeping,” Shelly offered. “If you want to put your bag down, wash up.” Her eyes sought out Lot’s father, asking permission. “Should I show her around?” Other people were gathering now, drawn by their voices. Two young men came out of the barn, one blond and the other with tight, dark curls cut close to his head, maybe in their early twenties. It was hard to know with boys; they always acted older than they were, miming the men around them so you couldn’t age them correctly. A third girl came from the mustard house, a baby balanced on her hip. She looked pretty and tired. The beagle struggled to its feet, took several steps toward Lot, and lay back down, as if it were similarly exhausted by the prospect of a newcomer.
Lot turned to her father, overwhelmed, but he was already back at the truck, pulling down the tailgate. Lot glimpsed boxes of lime, fertilizer, shrubs with their root-balls wrapped in damp canvas, and then her father waved to the young men, and they jogged forward, their eyes skating over Lot to land on the contents of the truck. The blond shouldered a few boxes of lime, the curly-haired one wrestled a shrub into his arms, and they headed off around the barn without a word.
Her father realized then that Shelly had posed a question. “Yeah,” he said, turning back to her. “Show her the big house and put her in Mustard.”
“In Mustard …” Shelly said. Not a question exactly, but a question.
“Yeah,” her father said impatiently. “The back bedroom.”
Shelly seemed to understand something then that she hadn’t understood before. “Of course,” she said smoothly. And to Lot: “This way, hon.”
Lot didn’t want to follow, but her father was already heading toward the barn with a box of lime on his shoulder.
“What’s the lime for?” Lot asked Gina, just to disturb the narrow stillness of her face.
She was surprised when Gina responded, almost immediately: “For the roses. They like acid in the soil.”
“Oh,” Lot said. “There’s roses?”
“There will be,” Shelly said, taking charge. “That’s the bushes your daddy just brought. Charles is gonna plant ‘em. He used to be a gardener.”
Lot followed Shelly and Gina into the big house, and over her shoulder, she saw the girl and the baby disappear back into the mustard house. She wanted to ask who they were, if she would be staying with them, but the question stuck in her throat. She didn’t want to admit that she had no idea how her father had been living for six years, who his friends were, if he had a girlfriend, what he did besides run a farm. And maybe he didn’t even run it—her mother had said that he’d bought a farm, but you could buy a thing and have no idea what use to make of it. Maybe these people were workers, Lot thought, or neighbors, or maybe one of them was his girlfriend and so these were her children—but Shelly looked the oldest she’d seen, and Shelly didn’t seem much older than the rest. To ask questions would be to admit that she didn’t know her father, that these strangers had something of him that she had relinquished or been denied. So she kept her mouth shut and wandered through the house after Shelly and Gina.
They took her into a wide, functional kitchen with an ancient fridge, an equally old dishwasher, a surprisingly long kitchen table. Then into a sitting room with lumpy armchairs, a low-slung couch, and a cuckoo clock on the wall—“It’s broken,” Gina said, when she caught Lot looking at it, and Shelly added: “Your father hasn’t gotten around to fixing it yet—he’s good with his hands.” Lot had not known that her father was good with his hands. He had not been, when he lived with her, but she nodded as if he had.
Exiting back into the hallway, Lot came face to face with a creaky wooden staircase leading upward; to its left, a closed door. The women ushered Lot past the door and up the stairs.
“What’s behind there?”
“Your dad’s study,” Shelly said.
“Can we go in?”
“It’s not for us.” Shelly’s tone closed off the avenue to questions.
The upstairs held three bedrooms. The one at the end of the hall was the largest, and Lot was shocked to see bunkbeds, wedged end to end, taking up most of the room. It had been years since she’d gone to summer camp, but the look reminded her of that.
“What’s this?” she asked, and Gina glanced at her like she was stupid and said, “Um, a bedroom.”
“We sleep here,” Shelly said, more graciously.
Lot studied the beds. “The boys sleep here too?”
“No, hon, they sleep down the hall.”
“There’s a lot of beds,” Lot said. She heard a note of accusation in her voice and wasn’t sure why it was there.
“Well, sometimes there’s more people,” Gina said and then firmed her lips when Shelly glanced at her.
Lot wanted to ask what that meant, but instead she asked: “Will I sleep here too?”
Shelly and Gina exchanged a look so quick that it was a flicker of eyes. “Well,” Shelly said, “there’s the bedroom in your dad’s little house, he thought you might like to sleep there.”
“But then where would he sleep? And what about the woman with the kid?”
The women flickered their eyes again, and it was Gina who answered. “Mandi sleeps here with us,” she said. She jerked her chin to a half-closed door at the end of the narrow hallway. “And that there is your dad’s bedroom.”
Lot was startled. “He doesn’t sleep in his own house?”
Gina started: “That house is—” but Shelly cut her off, her voice a gentle blade that divided Gina from speech into silence.
“We all like to share a roof,” she said, keeping her eyes steady on Lot’s. “It’s a lot more like family that way.”
Lot wanted to shout: What do you know about family? She wanted to ask: Which of you is my dad dating? She wanted to say: How can this be a family? I’ve never heard of any of you. But she swallowed and nodded, and Gina and Shelly turned away as if looking for the next thing to show her and gave her a steady privacy in which to master her face.
When they descended the narrow stairs, Lot moved ahead with restless speed, though she didn’t know where she was going. Gina and Shelly hung back behind her, and as she reached the bottom, she heard Gina’s whisper: “Is she really his daughter?” and Shelly, muzzling her with a single, harsh puff of air through her teeth: Shhh.
That first dinner was unlike any Lot had experienced.
All of them ate crowded around the long, rectangular table: three women, two boys, her father, herself, a baby. Pots of beans and lentils and rice were set out in the middle, and Gina served everyone, adding a slice of crusty bread to each plate without asking who wanted it. Nobody objected, so Lot didn’t either. Lot had expected the lively conversation of adults trying to make her feel at home. Either that or the sly questions of adults trying to coax out information about what she had done to be sent here. But dinner was quiet. People chewed, and the baby cooed and banged a spoon against the side of a plate until its mother, Mandi, took the spoon away, and then it screamed in rage until she gave it back. There was sporadic conversation about the rose bushes, about the lime, about digging up the lot behind the barn and tilling the soil. There was a conversation about taking cut flowers to the farmers’ market on Tuesday. There was a conversation, begun and quickly aborted, about the beagle—Jamie’s beagle, someone said, and then the conversation was strangled.
Lot looked up at this, interested. She didn’t think she’d met a Jamie yet. “Who’s Jamie?”
Seth, the blond, shook his head at her warningly. Confused, she looked to her father, at the head of the table. His worn hand moved in a steady gesture between his bowl and his mouth, ferrying the wet mass of lentils and rice.
“The beagle is dying,” he said gravely.
To her left, Gina made a choked sound. Startled, Lot looked over and saw Gina’s eyes were large and filled with tears. She hadn’t imagined that such a stricken look could live on the other girl’s face. Gina hunched over her own bowl, shoving lentils around with crusty bread, while one salty tear fell into the yellow-brown mass, and then another. Lot looked back at her father, alarmed.
“Gina,” he said. His voice was baritone, it resonated more than Lot remembered. He sounded like God. “Gina, do you need to gather yourself?”
Gina nodded mutely and pushed back her chair. She got up from the table and walked out of the kitchen. Lot swiveled her head uneasily between the door and her father, who was eating as if nothing had happened.
“Is she okay?”
Nobody answered. Into the silence, Lot opened her mouth to ask again, and Shelly spoke, her gaze directed studiously down into her bowl. “She’s sad about the beagle.”
Lot thought that was all anyone would say, but then her father lifted his eyes and addressed the whole table, and a lilt took his voice, a rhythm that felt like the bones of a sermon.
“Death is a thing that saddens us before we understand it. We feel the terrible injustice of what’s being taken from us, and it takes a great deal of work on our part to expand ourselves past our selfishness. The tides take but the tides always return. Rufus leaves as a beagle and returns as a bumblebee. When we cry, we’re hoarding in our arms the things we think we’re owed. But we’re owed nothing, we’re the debt, we’re the collective cost of the universe, we are sunlight, we are ferns, we are the earth we till, we are free.”
Lot’s jaw nearly dropped. She wanted to ask her father if he was all right, but as her eyes traveled around the table, she saw that Shelly and Mandi were smiling—radiant, unforced smiles—and so was Seth and so was Charles, and even the baby was quiet. Gina leaned in the doorway, listening; her face was wet, but her eyes were fixed on Lot’s father, and the adoration in them was just for him. Her father had ushered in a peace that blanketed them. Lot didn’t understand how or why, but she could feel the change in the room. They loved him, she thought. He was their father—maybe more so, even, than he was hers. And she felt an immense surge of jealousy at the same time that she felt a tidal gladness: though he had been away from her so long, though she had lost the privilege of proximity, at least he was not—when he finally returned to her life—in any way a disappointment.
Over the next few weeks, Lot watched her father.
At first, she wasn’t sure where she was supposed to be, if anywhere. Nobody made suggestions or gave her directions. No one even made requests. The others went about their business with the fixed focus of routine. On her first and second day, Lot felt defiant. They better not ask me to help, she thought, I’m the daughter, I don’t have to do anything I don’t want. By the third day, she was bored, and then—sleeping alone in the mustard-colored house—she became lonely. When she thought of her father in the big house, his sleep sounds lifting and mingling with the sleep sounds of the others, she wanted to punch someone. She knew that she was being offered a privacy that no one else seemed to have and that it was perhaps intended as a gift. But also, she was being reminded that she didn’t belong. Even Rufus the beagle slept in the big house. Only Lot was exiled.
By the end of her first week, watching her father turned into following him. Often, she stood where he wouldn’t see her and studied him as he knelt in the mud of the long garden furrows, as he loped between the goat shed and the chicken coop, as he checked the bee drawers from which arose a heavy drone. Lot was scared of the bees and didn’t get close, but from the time she awoke until dinner, she was never far from him, tucked against trees or crouched low behind the feed trough. He never seemed to see her, which was both a victory and a disappointment.
But one day, at the start of her third week, he turned decisively and beckoned to her. He had been examining the tall rows of sunflowers, already at his head-height. She was crouched against the barn, and she straightened in surprise. Had he actually seen her? Or was he waving for one of the boys? But when she hesitated, he gestured to her again, impatiently.
Lot walked toward him, trying not to rush but her feet wanting to hurry before he lost interest. When she was within earshot, he said, “Grab that bucket.” She saw a blue bucket and hoisted it up. “You’re gonna fill it with water—five inches,” he said, gesturing to the spigot at the trough, “and bring it over.” She did, the bucket banging painfully against her bare shins, and all afternoon her father scythed down impossibly tall sunflowers, their stems as thick as a baby’s wrist, and Lot tied the flowers with twine in bundles of three or five and propped them in a series of blue buckets to keep them fresh. These would be sold at the farmer’s market the next day, she learned, along with flowers and eggs and goat’s milk and honey and beeswax candles that Mandi had made.
Later, she and her father washed mud off the truck, alternating the long hose with buckets of water where the hose wouldn’t reach. Seth came out briefly to ask her father about an order of feed, and Gina drifted at a close distance, squinting at them with her face shut down until Shelly called her indoors. Then it was just Lot and her father, alone. She felt in her every vibrating cell how rarely they had been alone together since she had arrived.
“Daddy?” She hadn’t called him this in years—she hadn’t called him anything—and the word startled her as much as it seemed to startle him. He directed a keen, interested glance at her over the hood of the truck. “I don’t understand who everyone is.”
“Who they are?”
Who they are to you, she thought, but couldn’t say it. “Like—how they got here, I guess?”
Her father studied her, as if there were two answers to the question, and he was trying to choose between them. And then he said, “Well … how did you get here?”
“Uh, I got sent here.”
He surprised her by smiling. “Okay, and why did you get sent here?”
“Didn’t Mom tell you?”
Her father made a dismissive gesture with the hand holding the hose, and cold water arced in the sun. She had answered wrong, she saw—this wasn’t what he’d meant. “You were in trouble,” he said. “Right? And you needed a safe place, a sanctuary. And so were they, and so they do.”
Lot looked at him, startled to muteness. She had wanted to come here, but she had never once thought that she was being offered sanctuary. At the word itself, her eyes unexpectedly and immediately filled with tears. She stood still, horrified, digging her right fingernails into the softness of her left wrist to keep herself from crying in front of her father. But he wasn’t even looking at her, he was following the direction of the water with his eyes. “There are so few places for safety here on earth,” he said, in his preacher voice, that intoning rhythm she’d heard at their first dinner. He might have been speaking to himself. “In the next world, maybe all things will be blessed. But here, it is a sacred thing to make a shelter.” And then his eyes cut back to her, and they were strange and gentle. It was as if he had just remembered that she was there.
“I want to sleep in the big house,” she said. She hadn’t planned it, but the words burst out of her and hung in the air.
“Okay,” he said. “If that’s what you want.” And he looked at her for a beat longer, and then he smiled, and it went all the way to his eyes. “You look like me,” he said. “I thought you’d grow into your mom, but you look just like me instead.”
She would have done anything for him, after that.
By the first days of August, Lot had become accustomed to the shared bedroom of the big house. She slept on the lower bunk closest to the window. Gina and Shelly shared the bunkbed across from hers, and then Mandi slept with the baby by the door so that she could get up in the middle of the night when the baby cried. Night hours were a collage of fragile sounds: the baby fussing; the women sighing; the heavy sway of Shelly’s breathing, always a little congested with allergies; Gina’s higher, lighter hiss; the boards creaking as Mandi and the baby passed from bedroom to hallway, where she could pace until it fell asleep again. Though Lot slept lightly here, she felt more rested than she could ever remember. The sounds of the women—and, down the hall, the boys and her father—filled her with a heavy pack-somnolence, the certainty of safety. She remembered the day of her arrival, wondering what all these strangers were doing here. Now, their presence felt vital, as if she and they were all outgrowths of the same resting body.
The weeks had fallen into an easy lulling rhythm since her arrival. Some days, Lot helped her father outside, and sometimes she helped Shelly and Gina in the house. Gina was not quite a friend, but she interested Lot—her vibrating intensity, her quick journeys from silence to tears and back to silence. Everyone else moved at cadences that seemed inaccessibly calm. Gina felt like a power-grid about to blow. And Gina was the one who reintroduced Jamie’s name into Lot’s awareness.
On the first day that Lot moved into the shared bedroom, Gina had directed Lot to the bottom bunk by the window with clarity and sternness, as if all other empties were claimed. When Lot indicated the top bunk—“Why can’t I sleep here?”—she felt Gina’s agitation rise.
“Sleep where you want, I guess,” Gina said sullenly and looked out the window, then down at her feet. Lot studied Gina’s face with quick sideways glances, then hiked herself up onto the top bunk. She lay flat, just under the slant of the roof, testing both the mattress and Gina. Gina’s fidgeting increased; Gina didn’t like seeing her in this bunk, Lot understood without knowing why. She gazed up at the warped white paint of the low ceiling. Someone had stuck green glow-in-the-dark planet stickers there, and she reached up with a finger to trace the rings of Saturn.
“You put these here?”
“No.” Gina was scuffing her sneaker on the floorboards, impatient.
“Whose bunk is this?”
“Yours now.”
“But whose stickers are they?”
“Jamie’s,” Gina said.
“Jamie with the dog.”
Gina shrugged. Lot’s fingernail found the lifting edge of the Saturn sticker, and she scratched it up gently. “Where is Jamie?”
“Leave it,” Gina said sharply, and Lot thought she meant the question, and then realized she meant the sticker. Gina turned and walked out of the room.
Lot pressed Saturn back to the ceiling with the damp palm of her hand and lay still for some time, listening to the buzz of her own mind, but no certainty rose out of the chaos to guide her. Eventually, she retrieved her suitcase from the mustard house and, in shoving it under her new bed, she found the first green bead. It had rolled into the dusty corner where floor met wall. It was the same color as the planet stickers. The second bead came to her days later in the gravel of the driveway, after a fresh rain—cheap glass shining up from wet black stones. The third one was under the bathroom sink when she rifled in the cabinet for tampons; it had rolled behind the drainpipe, and when her hand touched it by accident, she thought it was an insect at first and screamed. Jamie-green, she thought, and slid it into her pocket where it clinked against the others. Above her at night the ceiling glowed, the bunk glowed, with Jamie’s luminous absence.
It began like this, so innocently. She hadn’t meant to eavesdrop.
One night, she got up for a drink of water and descended the stairs, slotting her bare feet close to the wall so that the boards wouldn’t creak. But the house itself called to her, and she ended up walking through it room by room, and then she slipped outside and walked around it, crickets and frogs screaming from the fields, the moon high in the sky, and then she circled the silent mustard house as well. She was filled with a fierce love for it all. She felt it belong to her. She began to do this regularly. She developed small rituals: she would carry the green beads in her pockets; she would pick up a fistful of earth or grass and inhale its humid tang; she would listen for the same owl call low in the woods.
It was a surprise to her, the night that she saw her father and Gina. She had circled the mustard house counterclockwise, she had paused to breathe the piney, polleny air, and then there they were, emerging from the big house, Gina behind her father. Neither of them was looking at the other, but they were inarguably together. They crossed the wet grass. Gina wore a faded, pale nightgown that was not the basketball shorts she usually slept in. Lot’s father was in a t-shirt and striped pajamas; Lot realized she had never seen him in his night clothes. The air was thick between them. Gina entered the mustard house first, Lot’s father after her, and the door whispered shut, and the lock clicked.
Lot sat behind the barn for a long time, Jamie’s green beads hot and hard at the center of her fist. She knew the little bedroom well; she knew how it was tucked against the back of the house, how its narrow window looked out onto the back paddock. She knew that you could put a feed bucket under that window and stand on it and look in. She knew that the bed was against the opposite wall and, with the moon still high, there would be nothing obscured to your view, if you stood looking in; there would be no accentuation of limb and limb, no demarcation of young skin from older skin, no shift in texture that you would not see. If you stood staring down, you could feast your eyes on what you knew was not meant for you; you could feel a devouring loneliness; you could want to cry without understanding why. If you did this, you would sound strange on the phone when your mother called and asked how things were going and asked, “You sound sick, honey, do you need to come back home?” And: No, you would say, No, everything is fine, it must be allergies, everyone has them here.
After that, Lot’s nights changed.
She stood with her face at the window until sunrise, and not once did anyone realize she was there. She watched with a raw, insatiable hunger; she watched with awe and interest; she watched with odd resentment; she watched with a feeling close to sadness that was not sadness. She stored away the details. Her father and Gina went in; her father and Shelly; her father and Mandi; in the morning, they were all at the breakfast table, passing each other the milk, the cereal, the fresh fruit, while Lot was heavy-eyed, waterlogged with exhaustion.
She began to tell Shelly that she was helping her father that day and likewise to tell her father that Shelly had requested her, and then she would curl up—in the hay loft of the barn, or the bucket seat of the parked pick-up, or sometimes in the mustard bedroom itself—and sink into a dreamless, comatose sleep. When she woke up late in the afternoon, she would straighten her clothes, run her fingers through her hair, splash water on her face, and then slip into the kitchen as if she’d been industriously busy all along. She kept waiting to be discovered, but nobody noticed; they were all occupied with their own concerns. Once again, Lot had slid beneath the surface of their attention. It had been this way at her mother’s house as well, and at school, too, before she had seized matters in her own hands and made herself unignorable and frightening.
Well, fine, Lot thought. At first, she had warred with the impulse to open her mouth at dinner and unleash chaos. To throw it in their faces with spiteful pleasure—how invisible she was to them and conversely how much she saw. But as the days passed, this instinct waned and a quiet confusion came to live under her ribs instead. She watched her father across the table: the reckless way he chewed his toast, how he rubbed his nose with the back of his fist after he sneezed. She’d never known him better: the sharp bend of his elbows, his large veiny feet, the thick patches of hair on his shoulders, hidden by his shirt. At the same time, she didn’t know him at all. Of course she didn’t want to go into the mustard house with him—he was her father—but a weight bore down on her. The other women knew him in a way she couldn’t; she had witnessed but was shut out from their knowledge.
This was when she began to think of Jamie again. Not with her former needling but abstract curiosity, or even with the totemic interest in what Jamie had abandoned—the stickers, the beads—but with a new intensity and frustration. Jamie was something else that everybody seemed to share, another communal understanding from which she had been shut out. And so, one afternoon, she cornered Gina on the back porch, where she was beating summer dust out of the living room rugs.
Gina was resistant at first, but Lot crowded her against the porch railing. She used her body the way she had learned to do at school with the girls who feared her. Gina pretended she didn’t know what Lot meant at first, and then she pretended that Lot didn’t intimidate her; “You’re in my space,” she said plaintively. Lot had wondered if Gina would be her match—she’d even asked herself what she would do if Gina shoved her back—but this didn’t happen. Backed into the splintery railings, Gina caved quickly: “Why’re you asking me about her?”
“Because I want to know,” Lot said. She’d eaten a raw onion from the garden with lunch, and her breath was a hot stink. “What’s the big deal with her?”
“There’s no big deal. Lot, you smell.”
Lot squared her shoulders like a pugilist and angled her jaw at Gina, exhaling slowly and steadily. Gina winced and averted her face. “That’s not what I heard,” Lot said, although she hadn’t heard anything. “That’s not what I heard at all.”
Gina looked at her, interested and alarmed. “What did you hear?” When Lot shrugged, strategically, Gina swallowed the bait. Lowering her voice, she pressed: “Did they say where she went, after?”
“After what?” Lot asked, blandly.
“What did you hear?” Gina repeated, and this time, Lot used the hard edge of her voice, a tone that promised violence: “No,” Lot said, “what did you hear.”
Gina hesitated, scanning over Lot’s shoulder. But Lot had guessed that Gina wouldn’t call for help and she didn’t. After another moment under Lot’s baleful gaze and hateful breath, she gave in.
“I was upstairs,” Gina said. “I wasn’t even—but they were yelling—they’d been screaming at each other, Jamie was screaming back—and then I heard a chair fall over, and then it got really quiet. And I started to go down, but Shelly came up and told me to stay. Jamie had tripped and—she needed a stitch, she’d cut just above her eyebrow and needed a stitch—so they took her into town, and then after that, she left. I was asleep by then—we didn’t even say goodbye.”
Lot was silent, turning this over in her mind. Finally, a question emerged. “Who was yelling?”
Gina’s eyes found the porch planks and fastened themselves away from Lot’s. Then she knew the answer, and her next question came more slowly, weighted with her own indecision.
“Why was he yelling at her?”
Lot never knew if Gina would have answered because Shelly called from indoors just then, and when Gina roared back, “We’re out here!” she had never sounded so relieved.
“Your father is a good man,” Shelly said.
It was after dinner, the same day. Lot and Shelly were doing dishes in the kitchen. She could hear the boys’ voices out on the porch, laughing, the sweet slow stroke of a guitar chord. Gina was with them. Lot didn’t know what Gina had told Shelly, but the women were close; she had to assume something had been noticed or said.
Lot was looking out the window at her father when Shelly spoke. He stood by the fence, out where Charles had planted the rose bushes. He looked very alone, his shoulders squared against the oncoming rush of night. She didn’t know what he was thinking as he studied the roses.
“Some people go through a lot, and it hardens them, they have to numb the best parts of themselves to survive. That was my dad—the way he drank.” Shelly moved methodically, drying the dishes before they piled too high in the rack. “Your dad—he’s been through a lot, but it’s given him wisdom.”
Lot didn’t know what Shelly thought her father had gone through, but she said nothing. She was painfully aware of the crescent-moon birthmark that lived on Shelly’s left buttock; of the fact that her nipples were cinnamon colored and stuck out from her breasts like fat thumbs in sharp contrast to Lot’s own flat, pale circles. Lot liked Shelly best in the moonlight hours, when her body was transformed by its extraordinary maneuvers. Then, Shelly became alien and awe-inspiring. In the flatness of normal life, Shelly became officious and irritating. Lot turned from Shelly back to the window and found that she couldn’t see her father anymore—he had vanished somewhere.
“—grow things I didn’t even know could grow,” Shelly was saying. “I never had much of a green thumb, but that doesn’t seem to even matter. I guess a place like this, with someone like your father, you discover what you got in you. What’s miraculous is how you can surprise yourself.”
Lot didn’t think. She just asked the question that had been rattling around inside her since that afternoon: “Why did Jamie leave?”
Shelly looked startled, and then she looked angry, and then her face smoothed itself into the placid expression to which Lot was accustomed. Hard-won, Lot realized; calm might be a thing that Shelly was always fighting for.
“Jamie was troubled.”
“How?”
Shelly hesitated, then: “She made things up. She wasn’t reliable. You should leave Gina alone about her. It isn’t good for her to keep being upset—it was hard enough at the time.”
Lot tucked a hand into her pocket, as she did often now, almost automatically. She rolled a bead between thumb and forefinger, keeping her body angled toward the sink, so Shelly wouldn’t see. “Why was it hard?”
Shelly sighed. The sound of laughter drifted in from the porch. “Jamie wasn’t right for a place like this. She didn’t understand the communal aspect. And she said things to Gina—she wanted to scare her, when there was nothing to be scared of.”
“She left her dog,” Lot said, softly. She watched Shelly’s face carefully as she said it. “She left so fast, she left her dog.”
“Yes,” Shelly said. She polished the clean counter with the edge of her dish cloth. “Rufus was sick, so it made sense to leave him behind.”
“Is she going to come back for him?”
“No,” Lot’s father said from the doorway behind them. She had not heard him coming, did not know how he had managed to move so soundlessly across the creaky wooden flooring despite his size. Standing, he stooped a little; otherwise, his head might have brushed the low farmhouse ceilings. “Jamie’s not coming back, Charlotte.” He turned to Shelly. “The boys are asking for you on the porch.”
Shelly’s fingers were locked in the fabric of the dish towel, and the blood had left her face. She whisked herself out of the kitchen, looking at neither of them. Lot and her father studied each other. She could see it now too, when she looked in a mirror—the resemblance her father had named, the likeness of their eyes, their cheekbones, the set of their jaws. Already, she could see almost nothing of her mother in her face.
“If you have questions,” her father said, “you should address them to me.” When the silence extended, her father spoke again. “Your mother told me,” he said. “What happened at school. What you did to the girls. Do you know what I’m referring to?”
Lot hesitated, then nodded.
“Is it true?”
She waited for his anger, but he seemed to be waiting for her, instead. She nodded again.
“You were very cruel to them,” he said, as if testing her.
Again, Lot nodded. She felt the need to plead her case, but what would she have said? How it started, perhaps—although she wasn’t sure how it had started. She had been invisible, a resentment had built inside her like a gale force wind, and then it began to leak out of her. As she became increasingly feared, she was no longer ignored. So it kept going, the fear feeding her visibility, until all day long, she could smell the weakness in the girls around her—it sang to her, it demanded that she do something, that she keep doing, that she do more and worse. And then it had gone too far; even she knew she had gone too far. The blood on the asphalt, that girl’s front tooth gleaming from the pavement like an accusation. But even then, as ashamed and afraid as she had been, she had been seen—for a brief and searing time—by her mother, her teachers, the principal. Their alarm and consternation had been thrilling.
Her father stared into her eyes, and under the lens of his unwavering attention, she felt this thrill again.
“All right,” he said. “Ask me.”
“Why did Jamie leave?”
“She got frightened.”
“Why?”
He kept his eyes on her, steady. “She thought she saw something bad happening, but she was confused.”
Lot’s mouth was dry. She wanted to ask the most obvious question, but as she drew in breath, she realized that she did not want the answer. She pivoted: “And you couldn’t explain to her?”
“Jamie decided that she didn’t trust the people here, and she didn’t trust the process. Where there’s no trust, there’s no family. We couldn’t have her stay after that. Do you understand that?”
Even as Lot nodded, she heard herself ask, thready and small: “But she … didn’t she hurt herself?”
Her father’s face shifted, infinitesimally. “Who said that?”
“She … fell? I thought—Gina said—she cut her eyebrow, maybe, when she fell? Is that …?” The rest of the question suspended itself as Lot found herself unwilling to complete it. She licked her dry lips and then closed her mouth.
His stare drilled into her. And then, suddenly satisfied, he softened. “You are very much my daughter,” he said. “You have dark energies, yes. But also, you understand the need to keep going. We make mistakes in our lives—we make great and unbearable mistakes—and yet we must keep on. Each mistake must be our teacher. For some people, perhaps, it makes sense for them to be punished. Locked up, even, restricted. But if you have a higher calling—what’s the use of punishment? You must follow the path you’re on. To be held back from your path by … the littleness of …” He made a gesture, as if wiping something sticky off his long fingers. He studied her again. “Anger isn’t useful to us, Charlotte. Anger is our burden. When we lose our tempers, you and I, that is a mistake that we have to learn from. And when we remedy our errors and keep going … Do you know what that makes us?”
Wide-eyed, Lot shook her head.
“Leaders,” her father said, and his voice was infinitely soft, and one day it would be her voice—she would talk to people like this, x-raying them with her voice until everything in them felt known by her. “It makes us leaders.”
Lot stared into his gaze, which would be her gaze. She felt her shoulders strengthen and her limbs lengthen, she felt the veins branch outward in her feet as she grew taller. The question she hadn’t asked still lived in her. She could feel it tightening the back of her throat; she kept her jaw clamped against it. This was her father, and this was her home, across the summer she had chosen both, and there were things you had to do to preserve a home. There were things you had to know without knowing, or know in a place that was so deep inside you that you couldn’t access it all the time. And the thing of knowing and unknowing at the same time: that could be the answer to all the questions you never asked. All of this moved through her so quickly, like fish in a creek, darting and bright, barely troubling the surface, there and then gone. Her father watched her with gentle eyes.
“I understand,” she said, in the direction of what had left her. “I understand.”
In the fall, before Lot left the farm, she spent her afternoons planting kale, turnips, and beets under the weak and cooling sun. She was being sent to a private school—her mother had arranged it—for children who were either artistic or disturbed or both; she would be starting in the second semester, which was the earliest they could fit her in. She stayed on the farm through Thanksgiving, watching green become wild gold and scarlet, color like a maelstrom lashing the trees, then watching the great fade begin, as the bleached beige and bone of winter took over. When the sky turned a gentle, impenetrable, constant gray, she left, and decades would pass before she found her way back. By then, her father would be dead; the farm long sold, the land grown over; fires would have gutted the house and the barn.
Before this happened, however, she would be on her knees behind the barn one day. She would be moving slowly across the garden rows, migrating closer and closer to the rose bushes planted in early summer, where a sharp glint would catch her eye. Digging clumsily, she would find them there: those green beads, sprinkled like seeds, waiting to transform.
It would take her a moment to know what they were. She would roll them in her fingers just as she had done that August evening in the kitchen, and as the moist dirt fell off them, she would recognize the green gleam—beads that you wore on a piece of elastic string around your wrist, elastic that broke so easily. Lot would begin to count them, not knowing what else to do; she would count seven before she started scooping the earth back over them again with no intention of finding what might lie deeper still—the dirty crumple of fabric, the thinness of a sleeve or a shoelace, the undersea tendrils of hair caked through with soil, far down below the rose bush roots that grew eagerly in all that lime. The ground was full of little rocks, and maybe that’s all those beads had been, actually—oddly colored pebbles—she hadn’t seen them clearly.
And, smoothing the dirt with her palm, she would glance across the garden toward the barn, the two houses, the semi-circle of structures that felt like an embrace, that had become synonymous in her mind with the curve of her father’s shoulders, and—more firmly now—she would know the thing that she had first glimpsed in the August kitchen: that love requires vast silence; the silence of things held in the different enclosures of your mind; an architecture of impossible contradictions that becomes a whole structure, until you are living inside the container of your love, until you are kept by it, twisting and growing to fit the shapes that it permits you; and when you are asked—in years to come, in your adult life, far from the roses and the beets and the beads—when you are asked about your father, it is the love that speaks for you from the tight channel of your throat; it is the love that declares him a good and an innocent man.
