Kneeling with her phone to her ear, Kaylene snapped open her guitar case. She checked for spare strings and brushed the black and orange Halloween pom-pom she’d affixed to the top of the tuning pegs. She’d first started clipping baubles there right after she got the instrument, long before she and Rebecca started playing live: ribbons; a shell bracelet Eddie had made her on her last birthday; a cutout cardboard square from a strawberry Twinkie box she’d dangled there in honor of her murdered friend Marlene. When Rebecca saw that one, she’d cried, but she hadn’t made Kaylene strip it off.
Once upon a time, not so long ago—before the whistling freak first stepped out of Halfmoon Lake woods—the decorations would have been instantaneous, automatic, the kind of thing she had always done without even thinking. The practice necessary to get good on guitar, on the other hand, never mind write songs on it, would have taken more time than she was willing to give any one activity, and demanded far too much single-minded attention.
But these days, practicing music distracted her. Playing it live, in lights, onstage, with Rebecca blasting away on her drums from the shadows, positively dissolved her. Decorating her instrument, meanwhile, and tricking it out, had become ritual. Sometimes, Kaylene was convinced she had accidentally transformed her instrument into a fetish, or, as Rebecca preferred to say, spirit animal. It had even given them their band name, the night Trudi grudgingly donated one of her threadbare, obsidian-eyed creations from her dresser drawer.
From that moment on, she and Rebecca were officially Sock Puppet. The screaming, slamming strawberry Twinkie-accented scourge of the isles. The scourge you screamed along with. Or to.
Who would have believed it of either of them?
“I know, Mom,” Kaylene said into the phone now, because somehow her mom was still talking. Standing, she checked her elbow-length black pigtails, yellow-striped shirtdress, and violet knee socks in the closet mirror. She looked like a Heffalump in the midst of a Winnie-the-Pooh honeypot dream, without the insta-grow trunk and with harder eyes. “I wish I could explain.”
Tonight, though, her mom wouldn’t let up, couldn’t stop herself. She kept right on talking, talking, blaring her loneliness into Kaylene’s life like a searchlight and thereby lighting up Kaylene’s own. This was why she hated talking to her mother, these days. If she was being honest with herself, she’d hated talking to her mother ever since Halfmoon Lake woods. Just one more good thing the freak in the hat had ripped from her.
“I know you’re my family,” she heard herself say, automatically, same as she always did. “I know Jess and Joel and Benny and Rebecca and Trudi and Eddie are just…”
Fellow survivors, she thought, while her mother pleaded, begged, sighed, and missed her. Just the people she’d wound up marooned with on an island off the other edge of the country, three thousand miles from her childhood home, which was already six thousand miles from her parents’ childhood home.
“Want to know what I’m eating? Kaylene, are you still there?”
Even now, Kaylene instinctively stiffened when her mother cracked that voice. She held her breath, waited, realized her mother wasn’t going to let her off that easy. Tonight, she was going to make her ask for it.
“What are you eating?”
“Bao,” said her mother. And then she actually did it. Crafty Fox-demon. She took an audible bite, right there on the phone, and made her bao-eating moan.
“Pork and shrimp?” Kaylene whispered.
“Red bean,” said her mother through her chewing.
“Bitch,” Kaylene said, and she got the tone just right, for once. She knew she had even before her mother laughed.
“I miss you so much, Little Dug.”
“I miss you, too, Mom. I really do.” She really did, she realized. So much.
“Come home, Kaylene. Soon.”
Come see me, she almost said, turning to the window and drawing back the curtain. The problem was that the second she said that, her parents would be on a plane. Both of them. And somehow, the thought of them here, in this secluded compound that only felt like a fortress, and only because everyone who lived here needed it so much to feel that way, was ridiculous. Disturbing, even. Just the idea of Laughing Dad on Skis and Mom of Warm Bao and Sunday Crosswords appearing in the rain at the pinewood front door, introducing themselves to Jess, trying to make sense of their daughter’s relationship to Eddie and Trudi, coming to a Sock Puppet concert and getting an earful of the racket she and Rebecca had taken to unleashing …
Across the grass, in the shadow of the firs and western hemlocks that ringed the compound, Kaylene saw a girl-shaped silhouette glide behind the drawn curtains of the single, upstairs window in the stumpy windmill shed out back where Jess, Benny, and Trudi slept. Since Jess was downstairs helping Benny with dinner, Trudi had to be alone out there again, brooding over her books or her knockoff not-nearly-iPhone, texting whoever the hell she texted. Beyond the windmill shed and the trees, above the cliffs and the Strait, the red in the sky intensified as the sun sank. The glow permeated the trees, turned even the evergreens orange.
“Kaylene,” her mother snapped again, startling her. She’d forgotten, again, that she was still in the middle of a call.
“Sorry, Mom. Listen—”
“Dinner,” said Rebecca, appearing at the door in her stage blacks, brown hair bound up tight at her neck, her drummer’s arms positively ropy in her sleeveless sweater. No trace of gooseflesh, despite the cold. She looked ready, Kaylene thought. Rebecca always looked ready, these days. Like an astronaut prepped to climb into the big suit, head out into the void, and just fix something.
Or else she looked like a cage fighter. A larger-than-life (but smaller-than-life-size) gladiator. “A drummer you run from or duck under as much as dance to,” as that wanky critic-kid from The Stranger had put it in his first review of one of their shows. He kept coming back, though.
He also hadn’t been wrong.
Because, really. Who’d have thought the Rebecca Kaylene had known in East Dunham, New Hampshire, could ever hit anything that hard?
“Be right there,” Kaylene said, touching the pom-pom at the top of the guitar’s tuning pegs. She almost asked Rebecca to come touch it, too.
For luck. As ritual. Wondersurvivor powers … activate …
Right then, she almost blurted out her little surprise, the one she’d finally decided to spring tonight. Her Halloween addition, which she was almost sure constituted the next great leap in their mutual, ongoing life-reclamation project. She was only slightly less sure that Rebecca would think so, too. And yet, Kaylene knew she should probably say something. Give her friend a trigger warning.
She would have if her mother hadn’t squealed, “You will? You mean it? You’re coming?”
Flinching, Kaylene scrolled back through the last few seconds of conversation. “Wha … No, Mom. Hang on. I was talking to Rebecca.”
“Joel claims Benny made squirrel,” Rebecca said.
Kaylene rolled her eyes. One corner of Rebecca’s mouth curled. The frayed edge of her old smile, the one only Joel, and then—very briefly—Jack had ever dragged all the way out of her, back in their Jack-and-the-’Lenes days. Especially toward the end of those days.
Sweet, grinning Jack.
“A squirrel Joel killed himself. With his fists, and some pine needles.”
“So we’re having barbecued chicken? Again?”
“I’m going to get Trudi,” said Rebecca, and left.
Rebecca always went to get Trudi. She was the only one who could. Kaylene wished that the critic-brat from The Stranger could see this little drummer woman, who’d frightened him so badly, do that.
“Mom,” she said into the phone, glancing once more out the window at the fog forming in midair as the dark deepened. The chill made visible. That was another major difference between the San Juans and New Hampshire, and a major part of what she loved here: when the cold came—and it always came—you could see it. She rushed the words past her lips before her brain could stop her. “How about you and Dad come here for Thanksgiving?”
This time, there was no squeal. Kaylene gave her mom credit for that, for recognizing the moment. They’d both progressed. One more life-reclamation checkpoint passed.
“We might just do that,” her mom murmured, so carefully that Kaylene burst out laughing. Her mom laughed, too. Carefully. For the thousandth time, Kaylene opened her mouth to explain, to try to find words for why it was good, better, to live here, for at least a little longer.
All that came out, though, was, “Good. Bye, Mom.”
“See you soon, hon,” her mother said, still holding in her sob. She didn’t even yell for Kaylene’s father to get on the line so he could hear the news; she just hung up.
Placing the phone on the windowsill, Kaylene leaned into the glass and was surprised yet again by the damp that seemed to surface in anything she touched here, indoors or out—trees, tabletops, telephone poles, pens—at the second she touched it. As though everything on this island were alert, curled up inside itself, rising to each moment of contact like a cat rubbing its scent on you. Reassuring itself, and you, We’re alive. We’re alive, we’re alive, we’re alive.
To her parents, Kaylene knew, what had happened in the Halfmoon Lake woods had driven their daughter to the other side of an impenetrable wall, behind an iron curtain of grief and horror and sorrow. They still thought that was why she couldn’t talk to them about it.
What they’d missed—what Kaylene couldn’t articulate aloud, even now—was that to her, they were the ones behind the curtain, cut off from critical information about the world as it actually was.
Either that, or Kaylene had somehow strayed from the path her parents had so carefully laid out for her from the moment she was born. She’d found a magic wardrobe and teleported into fairyland, where whistling monsters in sombreros shredded people like string cheese, and bald eagles and barred owls rode arctic winds into the firs and twisting madrone trees, and killer-whale pods huffed in coves and sea caves, and fog came cold and open-armed. A place where Kaylenes and Rebeccas become regional rock stars. Where survivors and refugees holed up in a hundred-year-old A-frame on a grassy hillside with a windmill in the backyard and became … not a family, exactly. Not even a pod.
But a colony, maybe, founded less on love, whether felt or expressed, than shared solitude. Shared meals. A teenager and a toddler to protect and raise. And, yes, a grief and horror so deep and black that it seemed, constantly, to be streaming off one or another of them, or all of them at once, as though they were all brand-new creatures. A freshly evolved species that had just crawled up from the abyss—or out of the woods—onto land, into life.
Which, now that Kaylene thought about it, probably made them more like every other household in the world than she’d thought.
Maybe they were a family after all.
With a last, lingering glance through the glass at the oncoming evening, Kaylene knelt, rummaging behind her shoes and the box of college textbooks she hadn’t so much as glanced at since arriving here, and came up, finally, with the rumpled canvas bag she’d shoved back there five years ago, and never once touched since.
What had even made her take this? When and why had she hidden it?
For a few seconds, she stayed on her knees, holding the bag, feeling its barely there weight. The thought of opening it—of actually enacting this particular bit of stagecraft—curled around her windpipe, wormed between her ribs and seized her heart.
Her boldest act of life-reclamation yet. Maybe the last one she or Rebecca would ever need.
It really could be. If she could actually bring herself to do it.
She wanted to call Rebecca up here, try it out with her or at least warn her. She knew she should.
But she couldn’t risk her bandmate’s reaction. What if Rebecca decided she wasn’t ready, or got furious? She’d become so much less predictable behind that gentle, remote Rebecca-face these days.
No. Already, Kaylene felt she’d waited too long. She’d let the monster of Halfmoon Lake steal far too much, from all of them, for far too long.
“Asshole,” she whispered.
Carefully, as though unpicking stiches, she curled a finger through the drawstring at the mouth of the bag, tugged it open, and pulled out the Whistler’s hat.