My brother and his wife lived off the grid, in the foothills of Las Trampas Wilderness.
The nearest town was Moraga, sleepier than usual tonight beneath the darkness and heat. Windborne snack wrappers waltzed the strip-mall parking lot. Past St. Mary’s College I hooked sharply onto Jupiter Creek Road and wound through a tight, leafy canyon.
As I drove, my phone dropped bars, three to two to one, like a firing squad mowing down a row of the condemned. The gaps between mailboxes lengthened. Then several boxes formed a consolidated delivery point. After that, no boxes. The United States Postal Service had made its stand. Not one inch more.
Cruising with the window down, I could hear the creek that ran parallel to the road and gave it its name. The turn was easy to miss: a bike reflector, affixed to the trunk of a big-leaf maple, marking the spot where a crumbling culvert bridge jumped the water. On the other side concrete gave way to rutted dirt.
I bounced along at a crawl through alders and oaks, shrubs and creepers.
The genuine version of what Rory Vandervelde’s landscaper designer had sought to evoke.
Six and a half acres had cost Luke and Andrea about the same as what Amy and I paid for sixteen hundred square feet. The trade-off was scant creature comfort and human contact.
I switched on my brights. The underbrush rippled with panic.
The parcel had come with a simple wooden longhouse, plonked in a clearing besieged by regrowth. There was an outdoor shower stall and an outhouse with a composting toilet. To these Luke and Andrea had added a chicken coop, raised vegetable beds, a potting shed. Late-season wildflowers flourished around an aboveground cistern. Solar panels made a modernist Stonehenge.
Charlotte loved it here. The setting brought out her latent savage. She harassed the chickens, ran through the grass in delirious circles, war-whooping and ripping up handfuls of vegetation. Every visit ended with me hauling her wailing to the car, her fingernails black, her diaper heavy as a sack of mud.
We didn’t visit often.
On the far side of the clearing Luke had erected a shelter for working on his cars: a poured-concrete pad, four pressure-treated posts, and a corrugated tin roof. Tarp walls kept out the rain. While Charlotte gorged on freedom and our wives scrounged for conversation, he would take me out to show me the latest active project.
Tonight the pad was empty.
I parked next to Andrea’s Nissan Leaf. Amber light filled the longhouse windows. Thin gray smoke twined from the stovepipe. I could not smell it because the air stank so deeply of char. Wind chimes rang unseen.
I started for the door.
The forest stirred.
I turned, took a few steps into the trees. “Luke?”
A deer exploded from the bushes. I stumbled and fell and it ran straight at me, rearing up to show the scraped undersides of its hooves and its belly taut with veins before it sprang laterally and punched through a dry shrub with a shattering of branches.
Hinges whined, light whipped the trees.
A woman’s voice called, “I can defend myself.”
“Andrea.” I rose, coughing dust. “It’s—”
She jabbed at me with her flashlight. “Who is that?”
“It’s Clay.” I’d dropped my own flashlight. I rummaged for it in the leaves, brushed myself off. “Do you mind…”
She lowered the beam from my face. She wore leggings and a T-shirt with the Bay Area Therapeutics logo: a green snippet of DNA sprouting marijuana leaves. Bare toes gripped the dirt. Her right hand trained a snub-nosed revolver on my groin.
I motioned for her to lower the gun, as well. “I’m trying to reach Luke.”
“He’s not here.”
“I tried calling. Him and you.” She didn’t answer. “Can we talk?”
She went inside.
In addition to a love of cars and “natural” landscaping, my brother and Rory Vandervelde had in common a preference for open-plan living, albeit not at the same scale. The longhouse lacked interior walls and was furnished with castoffs—a crooked armoire, unraveling wicker. The mattress lay on pallets. Over a meditation corner of rag rugs and zafu pillows, Buddha kept a serene watch. A folding table covered in food containers, vitamin bottles, essential oils, canisters of herbs, and utensils served as kitchen and pantry. Beneath it was a mini-fridge, beside it a wood-burning stove. Everywhere were lit candles. A close, oppressive atmosphere had built up.
Andrea set the gun on the kitchen table. Prying open a tin, she loaded powder into a tea infuser and reached for a kettle piping on the stovetop. Halfheartedly she offered me a cup.
“What is it?”
“Chamomile and valerian root.” She filled a mug, dropped the infuser, and flipped over a small sand timer. “It helps to relieve stress.”
I didn’t ask why she felt stressed or why she thought I might, too. “No, thanks.”
My brother and I had turned out different. The women we’d chosen to marry had amplified those differences by an order of magnitude.
Amy was five-ten, angular, pretty, and coltish, a middle blocker for her college volleyball team; an accomplished scholar and elegant thinker, confident yet humble, capable of assuming anyone’s perspective without forfeiting her own.
Andrea stood five-two in Birkenstocks. Hippy, hippie, plate-faced, she had a habit of smiling up at you while you talked—smiling, but not nodding, for there was no assent implied, but rather martyrly forbearance. When you finished, she’d speak her piece. Even agreement tended to take the form of a rebuttal.
Nice day, isn’t it, Andrea?
No, but it’s so much better than yesterday.
It was Amy who’d first observed that Andrea’s Zen-groovy-earthy persona was a coping strategy for profound anxiety. I hadn’t cared to see that, too put off by her condescension. She boasted a cereal-box certificate in trauma counseling, others in yoga, mindfulness, and holistic aromatherapy. Despite all that, she rarely worked. The main advantage of having so many degrees was that they entitled her to refer to herself as a “therapist,” which in turn entitled her to regard Amy, who held a PhD in clinical psychology from Yale, as her peer.
Amy didn’t care. It pissed me off, though.
But I wasn’t the one married to Andrea. Luke was, and they seemed to make each other happy. They’d met while he was at Pleasant Valley, when she came to the prison to teach meditation. She knew Luke’s sins, accepted him; cleaved to him, after the world had turned its back. So he loved her, and doted on her, endorsed her wackiness and cherished it.
How curative that must have felt for him—to love and be loved. In his self-deprecating way he joked about being damaged goods. Which he was. But he wasn’t a serial killer or a rapist. Plenty of women marry men far worse.
Andrea bobbed the tea infuser. Most of the time she piled her unmanageable brown hair beneath a kerchief or snood. Loose now, it swayed like seaweed. “What do you want with Luke?”
“He was on my mind. Both of you. With the…you know, everything. The fires.”
“We’re fine.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
My attention had migrated to the revolver.
Andrea stiffened. “It’s in my name. They can take away his rights but they can’t take mine.”
Were the police to show up with a warrant, I didn’t think that argument would carry water. “Do you know where he is?”
“Out.”
“Out where?”
She shrugged.
“When do you expect him back?”
“He’ll be back when he’s back.”
“Have you spoken to him recently?”
“Define recently.”
“Today.”
“Not today, no.”
“When was the last time you spoke?”
“Yesterday.”
“Do you remember what time it was?”
“Not really.”
Her calmness was maddening.
I said, “Did you see him?”
“When.”
“Yesterday.”
“No. I mean, yes. But not since then.”
“He didn’t stay here last night?”
“I don’t keep track of his every movement.”
“Sure. But”—but he’s your husband—“did he mention where he was going?”
“We’re two independent entities,” she said. “You and Amy can choose to relate to each other however you want but that’s not how we choose to relate. Sometimes he travels for work. Sometimes I’m on a silent retreat and we don’t talk for a week. He’s busy. We’re busy people. You might not understand it, but you can’t judge us for it.”
“No one’s judging anyone.”
She bobbed at her tea.
“Is that where he is?” I asked. “On a work trip?”
“He definitely could be.”
What the hell did that mean? “Did he say he was going somewhere?”
“Scott’s always calling up last-minute and sending him some crazy place cause he knows Luke will agree to do it. He snaps his fingers and Luke jumps.”
My brother’s friendship with Scott Silber stretched back to high school. Even then Scott had shown an entrepreneurial streak: scalping concert tickets, sourcing rare sneakers, procuring kegs for a fee. His latest venture, Bay Area Therapeutics, launched right as California legalized recreational cannabis. Six months post-prison, Luke joined as employee number nineteen.
Both gambles had paid off. The company had twice upgraded their offices to accommodate rapid growth. It was the first decent job Luke had ever held. I understood his sense of obligation.
“But you’re not aware that he’s on a trip for Scott,” I said.
“No, Clay, I’m not aware.”
“Has Luke mentioned anything to you about planning to sell his car?”
“Sell—the Camaro? No. Why?”
“He took it with him when he left.”
“I mean. It’s his car.”
“And this was yesterday.”
“That’s what I said.”
I’d been holding out hope, telling myself that Luke could have sold the Camaro to Rory Vandervelde at any point in the last nine days. Andrea had shortened that window. Dramatically.
“You don’t remember what time he left, though.”
“Ask me all you want, it won’t change the answer.”
“How about morning, afternoon, night?”
She blew a raspberry. “Day. Okay? Happy?”
“Has he called you since then?”
“I haven’t checked my phone.”
“Can you check it now, please?”
“I don’t have it with me,” she said. “I’m not sure where it is.”
“I’ll call it.”
“It’s off.”
The sand timer ran down. She reset it and faced me with crossed arms.
“Why are you so concerned about him all of a sudden?”
The premise of her question—that I’d failed to show concern for Luke until now—grated on me, not least because of the truth it contained.
How could I answer her?
Guess where I was earlier today.
Guess what I found.
Andrea stared at me defiantly.
She knew who my brother was.
She’d married him anyway.
Whatever’s happened, I wanted to say, you can tell me. I can help.
But I didn’t know if I could. And she’d never believe me. Why should she? I’d never gone out of my way to hurt Luke. But neither had I gone out of my way to help him.
Wind whistled through the wallboards in hot blades.
“Please,” I said. “I just want to talk to him.”
She made a put-upon face. “The phone’s in my car.”
“Do you want to give me your keys?”
“It’s unlocked.”
“Thank you.”
She lifted out the infuser, watched it drip.
The Leaf’s glove box contained a heavy nylon pouch whose label read RF BLOQ. I unzipped it and found a cracked Samsung Galaxy. It refused to turn on, and I only had an iPhone cable with me.
In the longhouse Andrea was sitting cross-legged on a pillow, eyes closed, cradling her mug.
I held up the Galaxy. “You have a charger for this somewhere?”
She looked over at me. Recoiled. “Get that out of here.”
She straggled to her feet. Tea sloshed from the mug and ran down her arms. “Out.”
Mystified, I retreated outside. I could see her through the open doorway, moving around in a frenzy, as though she were on fire. “Andrea?”
“…one second.”
“Are you okay?”
“One second…Move back. Farther.”
I stood among the trees.
A twisted black cable sailed out and pipped in the dirt.
I took the cable to my car, plugged in the Galaxy, and left the motor running.
I walked back to the longhouse, pausing on the threshold. Andrea huddled against the opposite wall with her knees drawn up protectively against her body.
“Can I come in?” I asked.
“Where’s the phone?”
“In my car.”
“Yours, too. Leave it outside. I don’t want it in here. I should have told you before. Do you have anything else?”
“Like what?”
“A radio. A walkie-talkie. Anything that puts out a signal. A garage door opener.”
“Not on me.”
“Okay.”
I set my phone atop a stack of firewood and stepped inside. “Are you all right?”
“No, actually. My head is throbbing.”
“Is there something I can get you?”
She seemed unwilling to abandon the comfort of the wall. She pointed to her mug on the floor. I brought it to her. Pink blotched her wrists where the tea had run.
“I’m sorry I upset you,” I said.
“Not your fault. You didn’t know any better.” She took a sip. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“You know like what. I use it during the day, I have to. But I try to limit my twenty-four-hour total exposure, especially close to…” She trailed off. “You should, too, by the way, if you care about your health, or Charlotte’s. Do you have any idea what those levels of radiation do to rats? Look up cellphone tumors. We’re conducting this giant uncontrolled experiment on ourselves and we’ll pay for it.”
She turned vigilant, as if she’d heard a siren. “What time is it?”
“I—uh.” I reached for my absent phone. “About eight thirty, I think.”
“Shit.”
She hurried to the makeshift kitchen, set the mug down with a thump, and knelt to open the mini-fridge. Light spilled out.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. They had solar, and she’d plugged in the Leaf, so there had to be a power storage unit somewhere. But the candles and the woodstove—not to mention her patent terror of electronic devices—seemed to relegate functioning outlets to the realm of science fiction.
From the fridge she took four small glass vials and lined them up on the folding table.
From among the jars and canisters she picked out several vitamin bottles, a red plastic sharps container, a tattered piece of paper, a bottle of rubbing alcohol, a zip-top bag of gauze, a second of syringes. She removed four syringes and laid them in readiness next to the vials. Consulting the paper, she rearranged the vials to ensure they were in the right order.
I came closer. The paper was a calendar. Each day listed dosages for various medications.
She shook out capsules of vitamin C, vitamin E, folic acid, omega-3s, coenzyme Q10, bolting them down with gulps of tea.
I was also close enough to get a good look at the revolver. Roundish, .22 or .38 Special. A purse gun, meant to deter a mugger.
I wondered if it could inflict the kind of damage done to Rory Vandervelde’s body.
I wondered if ballistics had recovered shells or slugs, and if so, what size.
Andrea stabbed a needle into the first vial and drew up a third of the chamber.
She held the syringe out to me.
I accepted it, reflexively.
She rolled up the hem of her T-shirt and pinned it in place with her elbow. The flesh near her waistband was mottled yellow and green and stippled with puncture marks.
She gathered a fold of skin, swabbed it with alcohol, and averted her eyes. “Don’t tell me when it’s going in.”
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”
“Put the needle in. Push down the plunger. Slow.”
“You can’t do it yourself?”
“No. I can’t.”
“What do you normally do?”
“Luke does it for me.”
“What did you do last night, if he wasn’t here?”
“I did it myself.”
“So—”
“And I threw up. Can you please stop talking.”
I slid the needle into my sister-in-law’s abdomen and injected her with Follistim. While the chamber drained she breathed out through her teeth.
I removed the needle. There was no blood.
“Put it in the sharps bin.” Andrea laid her finger on day thirteen of the calendar, lips moving as she reviewed the next dosage.
Day twenty read possible trigger. Day twenty-two, circled in red, was possible retrieval. The top of the calendar read Contra Costa Center for Reproductive Health. Their logo was a stylized pair of hands holding a stylized baby whose face was also a daisy or maybe a shining sun.
She drew up the second syringe.
“Do I…Should I aim for a different spot, or—”
“Just do it.”
I injected my sister-in-law with Menopur, with dexamethasone, and with Lupron.
I withdrew the last needle and she appeared to deflate, as if leaking from the holes in her body. She mumbled thanks, trudged toward the mattress, and flopped down.
“Do you need anything?”
She shook her head.
“Do you want the blanket on?”
“It’s too hot.” She squirmed, scratching at the dry skin on her calves, flexing and rotating her swollen ankles.
“Are you sure I can’t get you anything? Water?”
“It’ll just make me need to pee.” Unable to get comfortable, she sat up and grabbed her left foot and ground at it with her knuckles. “They’re like rocks,” she muttered.
I thought better of sharing that Amy had suffered similarly. “I’m so sorry.”
Andrea grunted.
I was about to excuse myself to check her phone when she spoke again:
“…could you…”
She was holding her foot, staring up at me hopefully. I didn’t understand what she was asking me to do. Then I did and I faltered. While the tone of her voice—of our entire relationship—had in it not one iota of sexuality, I had never touched her except to exchange wary hugs.
Like most anxious people she was highly attuned to any suggestion of wrongdoing. She lay down again and shrank into a ball. “Forget it.”
“I—”
“I said never mind.” She rolled over, hugging the pillow. I wanted to shake her, demand that she sit up and talk to me; could she please, for once, pause the Andrea Show. The shirt drooped against her ribs. She had lost weight, not a small amount.
Amy was thirty-three. We’d gotten pregnant with Charlotte by accident. The current pregnancy was planned but nearly as effortless. Say what you will about Luke’s shortcomings—I’ve said plenty—he loved my daughter and was a good uncle to her, and I believed he would do the same for the new baby. When I called to share the news he congratulated me enthusiastically.
Andrea was forty-four, three years older than Luke. She’d never offered us congratulations. If the subject arose at Edison family brunch, she didn’t leave the table or make snide comments or do anything so overt. She didn’t participate, either, biding her time until a new subject arose, as though pregnancy and children were as arcane and unrelatable as Hammurabi’s code.
I looked at her now, fetal on the mattress, and thought about her loud disavowals of Western medicine. I thought about the lab-made hormones coursing through her and the desperation that had driven her to resort to them.
Her eroded body, radiating tension. Her feet, small and distended and unwashed.
I sat on the bed, lifted her ankles onto my lap, and began massaging the soles of her feet. She made a brief show of resistance and went limp.
“Too hard?”
“No, it’s okay.”
“Let me know.”
“He does this every night,” she said miserably. “Every night, until I fall asleep.”
I nodded.
“He’ll come home,” she said. “He has to.”
I let a minute go by. “How do you guys coordinate your schedule? Do you share a calendar?”
“No.”
“Where’s his computer?”
“He keeps it at work.”
“He doesn’t bring home a laptop or anything?”
“I’ve asked him not to.” She yawned and scratched her upper arms. “God, I’m so itchy.”
“I’m thinking of anything that could tell us what he’s up to. What about his email account?”
“What about it?”
“He has two, right? Work and personal? Do you know either of the passwords?”
“I’m not going to tell you that.”
“You check. Or put the password into my phone.”
“I said no, Clay.”
The wind keened.
“Do you have a key to the Camaro?” I asked.
“Why do you care about his car so much?”
“I have a friend in the market. I thought maybe Luke’d be interested.”
She didn’t react to the obvious lie. “I don’t have a key. I never drive it.”
“Does he keep a spare around? In the car shelter?”
“I have no idea.” She yawned again. “You can look if you want.”
The candle at her bedside guttered and went out.
I said, “Is he keeping up with going to meetings?”
No reply.
I thought she might’ve nodded off. I leaned over. Her eyes were open.
“He’s clean,” she said.
“You’re sure of that.”
“I’m his wife.”
“All right. I’m going to take a quick peek at the phone. What’s the PIN?”
“Our anniversary.”
“Remind me, please.”
She did.
“I’ll put it back in your car,” I said. “Are you going to be all right?”
She tugged up the blanket.
The Galaxy’s lock screen showed Andrea and Luke in hiking gear, holding hands on a rocky outcropping. I keyed in the PIN, unleashing an avalanche of notifications, an indication that the phone had been off for some time.
I called him. It struggled to connect, and his voice came through chipped into digital packets.
You’ve reached Luke Edison at Bay Area—
The log showed several missed calls from him, all made the day before between two thirty and five thirty p.m.
No voicemails. No recently deleted voicemails.
I opened the text messages. The thread with Luke was at the top of the list.
One unread.
Sun, Oct 1, 5:54 PM
Baby I’m sorry