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I run my hands over my face, pulling on my cheeks. I want to tear out my eyes, rip off my ears. I want to not see where I am or know the things I’ve been told.
“What the fuck am I supposed to do?” I’m not talking to Ethan, or myself. I don’t even think I’m talking to God. I’m just throwing words into the air, hoping there’s an answer.
“I can’t tell you what you’re supposed to do,” Ethan says. “But I can say for sure what you’re gonna do. And that is feed Nickel and Dime for me.”
“Hailey can’t?”
“I don’t want her around the dogs.” There’s a protective undercurrent in his tone, a streak of caring, like the one fresh current in a stagnant pond.
“You two are so fucked up,” I tell him.
“Maybe,” he says. “But you’re just regular fucked.”
“How?” I ask.
“Well, for one thing, they’re technically your dogs,” Ethan says, pulling up a pic on his phone to show me adoption papers for Nickel and Dime, my name signed at the bottom. “I drove your car, used your license, took Hailey with me. The guy running the desk was too busy looking at her tits to check my face against the ID.”
My stomach sinks as all the fake dangers my brain had created for me fall away, and I’m faced with a very real, valid threat.
“It’s like you said before,” Ethan goes on. “Plausible deniability.”
Twenty-Five
Ava
The ground talks at Restoration Acres.
It’s been raining for three days, and the yard resonates with a soft sucking, followed by a gurgle. The first time I heard it I thought something unspeakable was working its way up out of the ground, like the rocks in Widow’s garden. But . . . worse. She reassured me it’s the ground drinking, then shot me a stink eye when I asked if she was anthropomorphizing dirt.
Inside the office, the incubator radiates heat, and I glance at the egg, noticing the ripples of movement just under the leathery surface of the skin. A new cage is next to the incubator. The cat we’d saved is pressed up against the side closest to the radiating red light, drinking in the warmth. I reach inside, and her one eye flickers open, but slowly. Widow had warned me that she was in a lot of pain and on heavy meds after the debridement, and to keep my hopes in check.
“Vet said that jaw will be an issue,” Widow had informed me when I got to work this morning. The only reason she can eat at all is because I’ve been bringing wet food to her every time I turn the egg, pressing my hand against the side of her face to stop everything from falling out of her mouth before she can swallow.
“She’ll make it or she won’t,” Widow says now. “You watching makes no difference.”
“What do you need me to do?” I ask, pulling away from the cage.
“Maybe check the trail cam?” she says, forehead creasing as she thinks of jobs for a rainy Sunday. “I’ve got a live trap out there in the west woods, trying to get that possum.”
The ditch mowers came through last week and a possum didn’t move fast enough, losing part of a paw and half its tail. Widow had caught a video of the injured animal, unbalanced and stumbling, one foot unusable, and missing the counterweight of its tail. It can still survive, but it will need to adapt, which takes time. The always-present threat of infection looms large as well, so she’s been trying to trap it to treat the injury. I strike out, boots squishing through the yard. Arch glowers at me as I pass his enclosure, twisting his neck almost horizontally.
“You can’t have my soul, asshole,” I tell him.
The live trap is occupied, by a very wet, very pissed-off raccoon that starts chattering at me when I break into the clearing. It puffs up its back when I approach but settles down when I hold my hands out in front of me.
“Hey, buddy,” I say, feeling tears prick my eyes.
Its panic is easing up, but it’s still desperate, as it tries to determine if I’m a threat or not, then realizes there’s nothing it can do, either way. It’s not calm, but a certain type of resignation that passes through it as it curls into a ball, hiding its face from the world. I fumble with the catch on the trap, flip it open, and walk away a distance. You’d think that a caged animal would bolt for its freedom, but some of them don’t. They hang back for a minute or two, not trusting that their fate has changed so suddenly.
“I get it . . .” I tell it. Inside the trap, it raises its head, watching me.
My voice breaks off, the truth of my words choking me. I don’t know what my life would be like without the constant weight of depression. Before, I would still have good days, but after what happened to me, they come less often and further apart. I’ve adapted to it, the way the possum with half a tail will, changing its gait, relearning balance. If the tail were to grow back overnight, it’d be lost again, stumbling, not knowing how to function once restored.
The raccoon makes a break for it, shooting up a tree and watching me mistrustfully. I head for the trail cam, trap banging against my knee as I walk, replacement batteries for the trail cam bulging in my pocket. A red-bellied woodpecker objects to my being here, hopping from branch to branch and defending his territory with a nonstop stream of chatter. I glance up just as he relocates again, this time advancing ahead of me to a pin oak. But he’s not the only flash of color in the canopy. I freeze, staring up at a white camera.
It’s not a regular trail camera, but a top-end one, made for security. I take a step closer, and a blue light flashes. The woodpecker chatters at me again, this time adding a high-pitch rattle at the end of his call, a staccato beat that lets me know he’s just about out of patience with me. Ignoring him, I follow the gaze of the camera, wondering what Widow is trying to catch out here. It’s not pointed at the path but beyond it to a clearing, where I can just make out the top spikes of a wrought-iron fence.
I make my way over to it, wrapping my jacket around me and putting my hood up when a gust of wind whips the canopy, dumping rainwater on me in a torrent. The woodpecker follows, landing on the fence and giving me what for as I come closer. The weeds are freshly cut down here, the path cleared; it’s both well-traveled and maintained—and it leads to the gate of a graveyard.
