NOW
If there was one thing I’d learned, it was that the universe never respected the plans you made. What happened a week after I’d seen Diana at the river flipped everything upside down, even plan B.
First, Angela came back from a supply trip to town, saying she had news. She always rented time on the public computer at Barclay’s whenever she was in Cohut.
“Anything from Alvin?” Mark asked.
“An email,” she said quickly. “He said something had come up—a residency problem, I think. He said he needed to deal with that and then he would mail us the deed. Who knows how long that will take?”
Mark swore.
Apparently, Alvin was supposed to send a deed for the property but hadn’t, making Mark wonder if his friend was trying to cheat him. Alvin, he said, had left the farm toward the middle of December last year, before Diana and Rudy had arrived. He’d acted strange in his last few days here. “He could barely look me in the eye and then he just hightailed it out of here one day when I was gone getting medicine for one of the goats. He didn’t even say goodbye, just told Angela he’d send the deed and left” was how Mark told it.
“But there was something else, something bad,” Angela said. She unhooked the bulging backpack from her shoulders and dropped it to the dirt.
She’d done a computer search for anything related to Mark or the motorcycle shop and found a small article in the Sacramento Tribune about a former resident who had drowned while swimming in the ocean near Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. The victim was identified as Joe Ramirez, formerly of Sacramento. He had been the shop’s bookkeeper.
According to the article, Ramirez had quit his job and moved across the border before the drowning happened. His wife claimed that her husband’s death wasn’t an accident and that he had been an excellent swimmer. Authorities were investigating.
Mark’s face went pale. He said he and Joe had surfed together at Ocean Beach a couple of times and he would never have drowned. “He must have found out what was going on.”
For a moment, I felt weightless with the news. Another person killed?
Mark said the death was proof of what he suspected: that things might be even darker than he’d imagined.
“Rick’s partner is the really bad one,” Mark said. “He’s not the kind of guy who will give up either. This is not good news. I need to think.”
He strode off before I could ask for more details. Angela said we needed to get the supplies she’d brought into the cache, which was one of the wooden buildings I’d seen when I arrived at the farm. Inside were shelves filled with canned salmon and trout; boxes of powdered milk, sacks of beans and jars of surplus peanut butter from the food pantry truck that came to Cohut once a month; homemade jams and bags of flour and rice. The floor was packed dirt. Evening was falling and I told Angela it felt dangerous to stay here.
“It’s even more dangerous out there,” Angela said. “Mark and I agree. It’s better that we’re here, that we stick together.”
All I could think was that my need to leave with Xander was even more urgent.
That night, Mark came back from a walk through the forest to the main road and presented us with a plan. He had already ripped down the sign at the road, he said, and now he would build a locked gate across the driveway and set up an alarm system that incorporated an air horn and a small trigger stick hidden beneath one of the stone steps to the bridge. And just in case Rick or his partner came a different way, he would dig a series of what he called spike pits on the three or four trails—animal and man-made—that led through the thick woods and brush to the cabin. These were to be deep holes lined at the bottom with sharpened sticks and camouflaged with thin branches and dirt or leaves. He said he’d learned the trick in Africa when he and Alvin came across a small settlement being terrorized by a man-eating lion. When hunters couldn’t kill the beast, the villagers had resorted to spike pits and finally destroyed the animal.
I told him that with the boys around, those kinds of things were dangerous. He said he would show Rudy the locations and mark the spots with stacks of three small stones that a stranger wouldn’t notice but would let Rudy know to be careful. Xander, he pointed out, never went anywhere without one of us.
I asked about Shadow and he said dogs were smarter than humans and would sense the pits and go around them. I told him I thought we should come up with a different plan.
“Don’t you want to be safe?” he asked.
What I wanted was to get away from here. What I wanted was to take Xander and sneak away in the night without a lantern or a flashlight to give us away, and how could I do that with dangerous holes and alarm systems and locked gates? Now I would have to find not only the keys to the car but also the key to the gate, and we’d have to leave during daylight.
Later, we were eating dinner—a vegetable stew—and I thought of the drowned bookkeeper and the doomed motorcycle tester and I pushed my half-empty bowl away. The image of my mother’s body on the barn floor came, and I imagined how it would be if some gunman burst out of the forest, then killed all of us. Or what if he shot us adults and then left Xander and Rudy alive, but then they slowly starved to death because there was nowhere for them to go for help?
I pushed myself up from the table.
“Are you all right?” Mark asked.
Angela stopped eating. Diana and Rudy were shoveling food into their mouths like they always did, as if it might be their last meal.
“No, I’m not all right,” I said. “We can’t just stay here like sitting ducks, not after what happened to Joe.”
Xander looked around the table. “I don’t see ducks.”
Mark set down his fork. “It’s just a saying, Xan, and we’re not sitting ducks. We’ve got a plan and it’s solid, and we’ve lasted this long without anybody finding us.”
“But what if they do?”
“Then we’ll be ready for them.”
“Leaving here means we’re exposing ourselves unnecessarily,” Angela said. “What if we got stopped by the cops for some reason? And how would we support ourselves if we didn’t have the land or our animals?” She got up, came over and hugged me from behind, squeezing hard. I could smell garlic and onions on her hands from when she’d prepared dinner. “You’ve been working hard, adjusting to a new life. You’re just stressed, that’s all. We’ve got this handled.”
“Please, sit,” Mark said. “You’re scaring the boys.”
Which was the only reason I sat back down.
Mark finished his stew and looked around the table. The light from the candle cast a feeble circle of brightness against the darkness outside. Xander was already yawning.
“I think what we need is some good news,” Mark said. “What do you think, Diana?”
She shrugged.
“We were going to wait, but, well, I just can’t.”
Angela looked perplexed.
“Drumroll, please,” Mark said, and thrummed his knuckles on the table. “I just found out yesterday. It was a big surprise but a happy one, for sure.” He smiled and waited half a beat. “Diana is pregnant. You’re going to be big brothers, boys.”
Xander sat up straighter. “How big will I get, Daddy?”
“As big as you want, son.” Mark laughed and pulled Xander onto his lap.
“I don’t understand. How could…” Angela’s voice trailed off. She looked from Mark to Diana.
“It just happened,” Diana said. “Apparently, I missed a few pills.” She looked away. “It is what it is.”
“What it is, is a sign of the abundance to come,” Mark said. “I told Diana that we’ll all be a village for this new life, that this child will be lavished with all our love.”
Angela turned to Mark. “But you said it was my turn. I’m the only one who doesn’t have a kid.”
I wondered about the conversation she’d had with Mark after my talk with her.
“Like I said, Angie, this is a happy surprise.”
“But it’s not fair.” She stood. “How come everybody comes first but me? How come she gets a baby and I don’t? It’s my turn, not hers, not Liv’s.”
“The winds of change are blowing, Angela. Be a windmill, not a wall,” Mark said calmly.
“She doesn’t deserve it. She doesn’t even care about the kid she has,” Angela shouted.
“This child will belong to all of us,” Mark said.
“How could you be so mean?” Angela cried, and grabbed her coat, then flung herself out the door into the night.
“She thinks she can control me,” Mark said.
“She’s such a child,” Diana said.
Mark asked Rudy what he thought.
Rudy bowed his head and kicked at the table leg until Mark told him to stop.
An hour later, after I’d put the boys to bed, Angela came back and apologized for her outburst. Her cheeks were pink with cold and she quoted Kai Huang. “ ‘Want is the root of unhappiness,’ ” she said. “I need to work on that.”
“ ‘Growth comes when we confront our weaknesses,’ ” Mark said.
They were aphorism vending machines. Drop in a subject and a saying spewed out.
“Good girl, Angie.” Mark got up from the couch, where he’d been reading, and hugged her, and she leaned into him. “Don’t worry. Things will work out.”
After that, she asked how far along Diana was, and when Mark said, “Six or seven weeks,” she said, “A May baby. Diana will need minerals and protein. Lots of eggs, beets, kale and tea for the baby’s development.”
I thought how hard it was going to be to break Mark’s spell on her.
Later, Mark came into the container to ask if I was OK. I’d been quiet at the announcement. “Stunned” might be a better word.
“I hope you don’t think that this rules out a baby for us, because it doesn’t,” he said. “We’ll figure out a way to add onto the cabin and maybe we can buy another goat and ramp up the cheese business. Or Angie could start making more of her wall hangings to sell to tourists in Valdez. The gift of another child is a reason to celebrate, not to worry.”
“Did you forget that someone is trying to kill us?”
“ ‘If we let fear be king, we will always have to bow before it,’ ” he said. Another Kai Huang quote. “We need to be ready. We need to prepare. But we must also continue to live with pleasure and freedom. Otherwise, what are we doing here?”
“That’s what I want to know. What are we doing here? Why did you stay at that job when you knew how dangerous it was?”
“I was careful.”
“Not careful enough.”
He stared at me for a moment as if deciding whether to challenge me. Then: “Don’t worry. I’ve got things handled.”
I shook my head. “I’m not cut out for this.”
The chair creaked as Mark shifted. “Do you mean you’re not cut out for defending us or for this beautiful life of love that we’ve created? Because if it’s that you’re not cut out for this life, then you should leave. Right now. If you somehow think that I can’t protect you, that you’d be happier without me, without this life, then be my guest. But Xander stays. I won’t let you take him.”
My heart pulsed in my ears.
“That’s not what I meant.”
He cocked his head at me. “Then what did you mean, Liv?”
I could see him waiting to spring his trap, to snare me in the choice: to say I wanted to have his baby or to leave Xander behind. Although he had never said it out loud, I knew he believed he was smarter than me. He’d gone to college. I’d never even graduated from high school.
I reversed course. “I just meant I’m not quite where I need to be yet.” I made my voice sound humble and repentant. What I actually thought was: His ego and confidence are his weaknesses and I will use them to get out of here.
“I guess I need to work harder. Get over my insecurity,” I said.
Mark cracked his neck the way fighters do. A quick snap of the head from side to side. “That’s all right. I forgive you. You’re still learning. I have to remember that.” The sudden shift of his emotions was unsettling. “I’ll just have to guide you better. Enlightenment isn’t easy but it’s always worth it in the end.”
He stood.
“I’ll try to do better.” The words were bitter in my mouth.
“That’s my girl,” he said.