Seven Months after the Accident
OCTOBER 1983
On the drive out to the site of Kat’s accident Jude notices that the cherry trees are already bare. She makes herself think about the trees because they are all too real and too alive; they adhere to a cycle, retracting and expanding, blooming and shedding, an order untouched by madness. She makes herself think of Genesis (or The Geneses, as she sometimes called her), the real and the fake, the comrade and the rebel, the alive and the dead.
Violet had sent her to the site, her beautiful and wretched Violet. Jude had done everything she’d asked—giving her money, giving her jewelry, orchestrating the breakup of Kat and Sab—but Violet was not yet finished. At their last meeting she had issued one final order: go back to where Kat had her accident, retrieve what you buried there, and do what needs to be done.
The drive is pleasant, a spectacular vista of an unblemished sky and lolling fields, and Jude imagines what others might see, what she wants them to see: just a normal, pretty girl enjoying the late fall day, perhaps meeting a boyfriend for a picnic or a walk beneath the newly naked trees. If only she could transfer that serenity to the inside, silencing all the memories raging through her heart, all those hard questions she’d asked and devastating answers she’d heard, all those steps she and Kat had to take before laying their final path.
When Jude thought about that path, retracing their steps back, it started that night five years ago, in January 1978, when Wen—formerly Jackie, Violet’s mother and master of ceremonies for The Plan—found them outside of 30th Street Station in Philadelphia, traumatized and exhausted and fleeing from a dangerous man. She drove them to her farmhouse in Upstate New York where they settled into the business of becoming themselves again, examining the many layers of The Plan, learning how far it stretched and how deep it rooted, how many lives it had seduced, how many more it had razed.
Jude resurrected all the questions that she’d banished to the corners of her mind, the questions Genesis had asked before she died: What about the pictures? Where are they going? Who is seeing them? Wen knew most of the answers and shared them delicately: King Bash and the RonDon sold the pictures to certain types of magazines, magazines that remain available in certain types of bookstores all over the world, magazines that only recently began to attract the attention of United States officials, magazines that are still widely considered benign—after all, where’s the evidence that such images cause any physical and psychological harm?
“Did King Bash believe that?” Jude asked. “Did Verona?”
“They did,” Wen said. “And for a while, so did I. It’s why they did not hesitate to incorporate it into The Plan. The whole belief that everyone should contribute, that no one was too young for responsibility, and, of course, ‘What you think, is.’ If you yourself thought the photographs were okay, then they were.”
After all those years, Jude and Kat decided that the photographs were not okay, an opinion shared by dozens of other escapees from The Plan who came and went through Wen’s doors, former monkeys and rabbits and scorpions and parrots and chameleons and wolves who confessed to a deep and interminable rage—sometimes burrowed into the bones, sometimes creeping to the surface, but always, always there, the sort of rage transferred to future generations, a rage that qualified as history. On some days Jude felt her rage so acutely she couldn’t stand still; the rage was tangible, a live snake in her hands, twisting and hissing and rattling its tail, coiling around her neck, rendering her unable to speak. She had to learn to wrangle it, she told herself. Treat the rage like a living, breathing thing that can be managed but never fully tamed.
For five long years at Wen’s place, they managed the rage in all the ways that were available to them. They learned attack and defense moves, how to shoot, how to optimize the element of surprise. They learned to be self-sufficient, cleaning houses for Wen’s company, earning enough money to buy their own car. They changed their surname to prevent Verona from finding them, choosing “Bird” in honor of their newfound freedom, their desire to swoop and soar. They reinterpreted The Plan’s tenets in ways that suited their needs. “Reject and Release,” they said in unison, their private insurance that the memory of the pictures would never overpower them. They rejected and released every hour of every day spent at Wen’s, twenty seasons of summer crackling into fall and fall freezing into winter and winter thawing into spring. Jude recorded them all with tally marks, scratching lines along their bedroom wall, a calendar of the time spent recasting their past. In the final month of their final year, they agreed that Jude had nothing left to record.
“We’ve finished, but we’re not finished,” Kat said one night during that last week. They lay in their twin beds, facing each other, close enough to hold hands.
“I know,” Jude said, and she really and truly did. But she did not want to walk this tightrope across Kat’s thoughts, teetering into a situation as treacherous as the one they’d escaped. They were on the edge of normal, so tantalizingly close to uneventful and mundane.
“Are we going to finish?” Kat asked. She inched close to the edge of her bed, the mattress squeaking. Jude could hear the faintest uptick in her sister’s breath. Kat was waiting; Kat was expectant. Kat was one tug away from adamant demands.
“I don’t know,” Jude said. “My mind is capable of planning, but I don’t know if my body is capable of seeing it through.”
Kat rolled an inch closer, perching herself on the edge of the bed. “Let’s split ourselves,” she said. “You can be the mind and I’ll be the body. You plan, and I execute. You tie them up or hold them down, and I make sure they never breathe again. The worst thing that ever happened to them will happen only once. For us—for so many of us—the worst thing will never stop happening, all over the world, for as long as we live.”
Jude studied her sister’s features, lit on one side, dark on the other: the one wide eye, the lone arched brow, the bisected lip raised into an unnerving smile. Kat was utterly mad, of course, but she was also correct. Without Jude, Kat would be careless and caught and sent to the electric chair. Without Kat, The Plan would thrive, and King Bash’s entire ecosystem would beat on, the children turned into animals, the animals turned into killers or prey. Without Kat, Jude would have to live with the knowledge that Gen had died in vain.
Who cared if it didn’t make sense, or if it was absurd and reckless, or if it would jeopardize their new lives, their After Lives, before they even began? It only mattered that Kat’s fury about their past exceeded Jude’s caution for their future, and that Jude alone could restore the balance.
“We are finishing,” Kat whispered.
“Yes,” Jude said. “We will finish and make everything even, and then we will reject and release that, too.”
They did not debate the question again, but when Jude said she planned to take the day off and spend it alone, Kat knew not to ask questions. Kat borrowed Wen’s car to go to work and Jude sped off in their own, heading south, the sky vandalized by gaudy orange streaks, the pumpkins preparing to be picked and carved, Emma’s Enchanted Hedge Maze waiting to be solved. The wind play-slapped her face and the weakening sun tapped her shoulders and she had a liberating and terrifying thought: This is as strong, this is as free, as I will ever be.
She parked on King Bash’s street in Norris Ford and waited for a sign that might never come. She did not know if he was in the row home or at the Island or behind the door of this stately old historic house polishing his collection of obsolete guns. She imagined what she might do if he stepped outside. She pictured herself delivering an axe kick and an elbow strike and gouging out his eyes with nothing but the tips of her feral fingers. She pictured herself throwing her arms around his knees and begging for love and forgiveness and promising she would be a good monkey again, the most helpful and industrious monkey he’d ever seen, a monkey happy to oblige any request he made.
None of that, she told herself. Reject and release.
Later she would try—oh, how hard she would try—but she could not reject and release what happened a half hour into her vigil. The front door opened, and out stepped not King Bash but Violet, darling, sweet, shattered Violet, her hair tied up and swinging like a whip across her back. She sat down on the bright red swing on the porch and pushed herself back and forth. She dropped her magnificent face into her hands and wept, her shoulders quaking like the feathers of a frightened bird. In each gesture and inaudible sob, Jude saw every unforgivable thing she herself had ever done.
She saw Violet being sent to the Big House because Jude chose to protect Kat instead. She saw Genesis and Melisa and Jimmy and Marcus and Lola and Genesis again, suspended from the real-fake tree, the slow-motion swing of her legs. She saw all of the rabbits begetting rabbits, the hordes growing in numbers, their capacity for savagery directly proportionate to their blind acceptance of Jude’s lies, the saccharine sheen of her promises. She watched Violet—real-time, real-life Violet—stand up from the swing and find within her bag a pair of pruning shears. She watched Violet snap the blades until every rose bush was decapitated of its buds. She listened to the snap and watched the flowers fall and could not reject or release the notion of her own complicity; she had been destroyed, and she had destroyed in turn, and in order to make things even she must destroy again.
Kat was right. It had to end with them.
Now, of course, Kat doesn’t remember any of this—the pictures, the rage, their decision to kill, to end what they had in their power to end. She doesn’t know that Jude still has nightmares about the RonDon, the lurching of their bodies and the slipperiness of their skin, the sight of them succumbing to stillness. She doesn’t know about Violet’s final threat: Jude must finish what they started—or else Violet will go to the police and report what she knows, offering Jude’s necklace and secretly taped conversations as evidence.
She pulls the Killer Whale over and parks on the shoulder of State Route 491, parallel to the stretch of highway where Kat swerved off the road and reinjured her already damaged head. She had been out of her mind, trying to keep Kat alive while flagging down help, but somehow she’d memorized the exact location, knowing she might have to return. The trees are thick on either side and lean in toward the road, forming a partial canopy. An overpass looms in the near distance, and yellow signs warn to watch out for deer and the winding turns ahead. Moving through the trees, she remembers what it was like to leave Kat even for a moment, bleeding alone on the side of the road.
She is reminded of yet more lies she’d told Kat: The accident had not happened the way Jude had described it. There had been a deer, but Kat would have crashed regardless. By the time Kat started the car and sped off, her head had already been cracked open. Her brain had stopped telling her body how to operate the car, and then her brain failed to operate at all. Before Jude could grab the wheel Kat crashed into the tree, her head colliding against the glass and coming to rest on the dashboard, her blank face turned to Jude.
On that night Jude had counted twenty-five steps, saying each number aloud, and now she counts again. The woods are eerie even in the late afternoon. The rustle of the leaves under her feet seems to echo and amplify—is someone following her? No, she tells herself, it’s just the darting squirrels and rummaging opossums and scampering mice. No one is watching as she finds the hemlock tree, just a bit taller than the others around it, with the uneven dirt at the base of its trunk. She undoes the work she did that night, dismantling the pyramid of three heavy rocks, the disheveled pile of twigs and leaves. The bags lay where she left them, still holding King Bash’s own vintage gun and the Saturday night specials acquired through her old rabbits, Jimmy and Marcus: cheap, compact, and with serial numbers already ground away.