Eudora Hale spent the warm months in Fairlady with her mother, and the cold months in Lost Lake with her father. That’s how it seemed, at least. Now that she was old enough—nearly thirteen—Eudora knew that whatever the time of year the sun would never reach Lost Lake the way it did Fairlady. Some parts of the world were difficult to find, even for beams of light. Sometimes Eudora thought she was the only person in the country who traveled back and forth between the two cities; her train car was always empty, with the uniformed ticket-taker her only companion for the halfday journey. When she reached her destination, her mother or father would be waiting in an otherwise uninhabited station. Eudora assumed that the train tracks still existed as a polite acknowledgment to the days when people still used to go back and forth between the two small cities.
Dawn Hale’s white house stood on a corner lot in the neighborhood closest to the center of Fairlady. There were window seats in all the bedrooms. The wide lawn ended at the rounded cul-de-sac. Eudora and her mother were never in the house alone—Dawn had two friends who had their own bedrooms in the house, and their daughters shared Eudora’s large room overlooking the smooth asphalt of the street and the houses on the other side of the circle. For half the year, Lily and Jane were Eudora’s sisters, her playmates, the ears on the receiving end of her whispers. Sometimes the girls took their pet rabbits down to the culde-sac and let them hop back and forth, knowing that they would never run away. A porch wrapped all the way around the house like a hoop skirt with a latticed hem, and when Eudora was in Fairlady, she liked to crawl underneath it and dig her fingernails into the rich dirt until they were black. Eudora loved Lily and Jane, both of them blond like their mothers, but she also loved being alone, underneath the house, where the soil was cool and dark.
The custody agreement was unusual: none of the other children ever left Fairlady, even if their fathers were elsewhere. Eudora had pleaded to go back and forth between Fairlady and Lost Lake, and the judge had been persuaded by her tears. Half the year exactly, split down the middle. Her school in Fairlady had finally accepted the situation, and dutifully handed out reading lists for the months she would be away. There was a library at her father’s, in a room they called the fortress, and Eudora knew where to find what she needed. When it was Den Hale’s turn with his daughter, he was more likely to show her how to aim a pistol, how to shoot an arrow into the center of a target, how to remain unseen using leaves and branches, how to build a fire using only her bare hands.
The night before she was due to go to Lost Lake, Eudora sat in the kitchen with her mother and their friends. The women were baking pies; the girls, breaking off the ends of sweet green beans. Lily and Jane sat on either side of her, all of them dumping the beans into a large, shallow bowl in front of Eudora.
“Did I give you the list of books for school? Have you packed your new sweater?” Dawn asked the questions to the whole room, clearly going down a list in her head. “Where is your toothbrush? Do you have clean socks?” Dawn didn’t know anything about Lost Lake—she hadn’t ever been, but Eudora knew that though her mother had agreed to the arrangement, it rattled her nerves.
“Yes, Mother,” Eudora said. Her small suitcase was already packed, mostly with books. The clothes she wore in Fairlady would be of little use to her in Lost Lake. When she was very small—a pip, her father liked to say—Eudora didn’t notice all the empty space around her, the air in between what people said and what she knew to be the truth, but now she could see it everywhere. She kept snapping the ends of the beans until the room filled with the smell of warm apples and sugar and then she too felt sad about leaving.
After dinner, when the girls had been sent to bed, Lily and Jane climbed into Eudora’s bed.
“Promise you’ll come back,” Lily whispered.
“Don’t stay away too long,” Jane added, her mouth only inches away from Eudora’s cheek. She was the eldest of the three, already fifteen, and tended to worry.
“I always come back,” Eudora said, and that satisfied her friends. They slept in a pile with their arms and legs thrown over each other, hearts beating strong and safe inside their chests.
On the train the next day, she was as alone as she had expected to be. The conductor who sat slumped into his blue uniform far back at the end of the car could not be counted as company, nor did he wish to be. Boredom and resentment clung to him like a bad smell. For the first time on one of these journeys to Lost Lake, being alone made her feel lonely. A wave of homesickness rolled through her, though she had been away from home no longer than an hour. She missed the white house, she missed her friends tumbling like kittens around her, and she missed her mother, who started worrying about Eudora as soon as she took her suitcase from the closet and opened it up. You would almost think Lost Lake was a dangerous place, you’d just about have to think jaguars and leopards and madmen with straight razors came stalking out of the forest to flit through the alleyways and little courts of the town. . . . Eudora realized that she felt guilty about having caused her mother such anxiety. She couldn’t even talk her out of it, because Dawn refused to hear anything about Lost Lake. If you didn’t close your mouth, she closed her ears.
Lily and Jane weren’t much better, and their mothers were the same. They all acted like Lost Lake was a childhood nightmare they had sworn to keep out of mind. At home—the clean, white house, fragrant with fresh, warm bread and cut flowers, which she missed so piercingly at this moment—when Eudora spoke her father’s name or that of his community, Lily and Jane, and their blond mothers, Beth and Maggie, looked at the ground and swiveled back and forth, like shy bridegrooms. Suddenly errands were remembered; something in another room, a book or a sewing basket, had to be fetched immediately. No one was going to tell her not to mention Den Hale or his remote northern world; yet it was clear that she was not supposed to say anything about that side of her life. (In Lost Lake, such strictures did not hold. Eudora had the feeling that people in Lost Lake spoke very seldom of Fairlady only because they found it completely uninteresting.)
One other person she was aware of traveled regularly between her mother’s world and Den’s, and that person made the journey much more frequently than she. It occurred to Eudora that the conductor, as unpleasant as he was, might be uniquely placed to answer questions that until this minute she had not known she needed to have answered. Eudora turned around in her seat and in a loud voice called out, “Excuse me! Hey! Conductor!”
The man opened a sleepy eye and took her in. He shuffled his upper body within the baggy uniform, lifted his cap, and rubbed the top of his head, still regarding her. He appeared to be either shocked or profoundly angry.
“My name is Eudora, hello. I want to talk about you, Conductor. For example, where are you from, where do you live? Which end of the line?” She had never seen him in Fairlady, so he almost had to live in Lost Lake, although he did not much look like the kind of person you met in and around her father’s town.
“Neither end. Wouldn’t have a thing to do with them places, nope. Don’t like ’em. Don’t believe they’re very fond of me, either. Nope. That’s been tested out and proven true.”
She squinted at him.
“Do you live in some town in between?
“There ain’t no towns between Fairlady and Lost Lake. All the civilization in this state’s a hundred miles to the east. In here, where we are now, this part’s pretty empty.”
“Well then, where do you live?” The second she asked her question, she knew the answer.
“I live here. In the second car up.”
“Are there ever any other passengers?”
“Maybe three-four times a year. Someone’s car broke down, that’s usually the reason. Or sometimes there’s official business, where a couple of big shots ride back and forth, whispering stuff they don’t want me to hear.”
For a moment, Eudora contemplated this picture, trying to imagine what kind of “official business” would demand so much in time and secrecy. Then she remembered the real reason she had wanted to get into the conversation.
“Conductor, you spend your whole life on this train, but most of the time, you never have any tickets to collect because you’re here all alone. I’m your biggest customer, and you only see me twice a year!”
He sneered at her. “You think I’m just a conductor, but I’m not. There’s more to this train than you, young lady. It isn’t really a passenger train, not mainly—did you never look at the other three cars?”
“I guess not.”
Eudora could summon only the vaguest, blurriest images of the other cars. Ranked behind the lighted windows of the passenger car, they had seemed dark and anonymous. It had never occurred to her that they might be anything but closed, vacant versions of the car she always used.
“There’s freight, in there. Most every morning and night, people load boxes into those freight cars. Big ones, little ones. I don’t know what’s in ’em, I just know it’s worth a lot of dough. And I’m the guard over all that stuff. I’m security.” The conductor checked to see if she had taken in the immense gravity of what he had just divulged. Then he slid off his seat and began to saunter toward her.
Eudora paused, a little unsettled by the conductor’s approach but not much caring about the freight. What was the big deal about some boxes? “I want to ask you another question. You must hear people talk sometimes. Have you ever heard anything about a man named Den Hale?”
“Dennhale? No, I never . . . Oh, Den Hale. You said Den Hale, didn’t you?” He had stopped moving. “Right?”
“Yes,” she said, wondering. “Right.”
“You work for him, or something?”
“No, I . . . no. He’s my father. He picks me up at the other end.” The conductor’s narrow head moved forward, and his shoulders dropped. For a long moment, he looked as though he had been turned into a statue. Then he wheeled around and moved swiftly down the polished wooden aisle. At the end of the car, he hit the release button and moved across the dark, windy passage into the next car. Resoundingly, the doors clanked shut. Eudora was not certain of what had just happened, but she did not think she would see her new friend again on this journey, nor did she.
Just past ten at night, eight hours after her departure, the little train pulled into the Lost Lake station. Eudora expected to see her father waiting on the platform, but the man occupying the pool of light from the nearest hanging lantern was not Den Hale but his friend, Clancy Munn. A tough character, Munn was roughly the size of a mailbox, squat, thick, and at first glance all but square. It was funny: when in Fairlady, she all but forgot about Clancy Munn—he was unimaginable in her mother’s world—but here in Lost Lake, he felt like reality itself. Clancy’s daughter, Maude Munn, was Eudora’s closest friend in Lost Lake. She was more fun to be around than the girls in Fairlady, with their sweet breath and brushed hair. It was as if the big strawberry birthmark on Maude’s left cheek had cranked up all her inner dials, making her louder, faster, and more daring than most other people. Eudora knew no one more alive than Maude.
When Clancy and Eudora left the shelter of the platform, the slight breeze, already much colder than the air eight hours to the south, whipped itself into a strong wind that cut through the summery jacket her mother had bought for her as though it were tissue paper. Eudora leaned in close to Clancy’s thick body.
“It’s always so much colder here.”
“You like it this way, only you forget.”
She laughed out loud, delighted. It was true: the details and sensations of Lost Lake were falling into place all around her like a jigsaw puzzle assembling itself, reminding her as they did so how much she enjoyed being here. She liked cold weather, she liked seeing snowflakes spinning erratically through the air . . . she liked the huge fireplaces, and the thick wooden walls, and the great forest.
Clancy turned on the heat in the cab of his truck, and they drove in contented quiet the rest of the way to Eudora’s father’s house.
Eudora asked for news of Maude, chattered about the conductor, and fell asleep on the last section of the journey. She came half awake only after the pickup had passed through an automatic door and entered a vast underground parking space. “We’re here, sweetie,” Munn said, and gently shook her shoulder.
Eudora swam instantly back into consciousness and looked around at all the empty parking spaces on both sides. Munn smiled and left the cab. Far off to her right, three men in black coats were dragging long, narrow boxes from the back of an old van and stacking them against the wall. Eudora had seen this activity, or others like it, every time she returned to Lost Lake, but had never before wondered what it meant. She scrambled out of the cab and trotted toward Munn, who was already twenty feet in front of her, carrying her heavy suitcase as if it were empty.
“Hey, Clancy,” she said, and he looked back over his shoulder, grinning. “What are those men doing, next to the wall over there?”
“What does it look like they’re doing?” He had not stopped moving forward, and was no longer smiling at her.
“Yeah, but what’s in those boxes?”
Struck by a sudden, most curious idea, one wrapped in the aura of the forbidden, she stopped and regarded the faraway stack of containers. Eudora thought of the train conductor and his precious cargo. The boxes were long and narrow, each one the size of a person. Munn stopped moving, too, and turned around to look at her.
“Could be anything inside those things. Don’t think too much about it, kiddo. Let’s see if your old man is ready.”
He picked up her case and led her up three flights of stairs, into a wide corridor and past several sets of doors. Asking him anything would have been a waste of time, she knew. As if in compensation, music and the smell of food drifted to her. Munn opened a door, looked at her for a second, then said, “Keep quiet and stay behind me.”
She nodded. Her heart was beating faster, and she felt flushed with anticipation.
Munn slipped through the door, Eudora directly behind him.
Over his shoulder, she saw the great fire at the back of the room, the massive table where the remains of a roast sat amidst scattered plates, glasses, pads of paper—the ruins of a working dinner. The fire and the low candles on the table provided the only light.
A group of men, her father’s friends and business partners, were seated on stools and sofas and easy chairs off to the side of the table. They were attending to the conversation in progress as if nothing could be more crucial to their futures. In fact, each of these nine or ten men was staring at her father as if he alone were the key to whatever lay ahead. They were dependent upon Den, she saw; he was at their very center. Den turned his head toward Munn and at last found that Eudora had come into the enormous room. Even at her distance from him, even in the dim, flickering light, she saw joy flare up into his eyes. He moved swiftly toward her, his arms held wide. Behind him, the other men watched his progress with the patient curiosity of dogs. Quickly, he pulled her into his embrace and began to apologize for failing to pick her up at the station. The men dared not move until he looked back and gestured.
Imagine, Eudora thought, it took me my whole life to notice that he’s the king around here.
Six months later, Eudora and Maude Munn had many times ridden their horses through the town and raced them over the fields. After long secret consultations and hilarious conversations; after luxurious meals and hurried, impromptu meals because she had to get back outside into the cold twilight to track rabbits through the fresh snow; after snowball fights with half the girls in town; after hours of lonely study; after occasions of ecstasy at the suddenly apprehended fact of really being there, wrapped in dark furs at the edge of the forest as light snowfall skirled down from the gray, shining sky and the hints of a thousand adventures seemed to shimmer before her; after long conversations with her father; after all of this, it had become her last full day in Lost Lake. Eudora and Maude were taking their final ride together on their favorite horses, and they came again to the edge of the forest no one was ever supposed to enter.
Maude’s horse was brown and white, with spots of dirt on his belly that she would have to comb out later on. The horse whinnied, and Maude settled him with a few pats on the neck.
“I don’t think even he wants to go in there,” she said. Maude shifted on the horse’s back, uneasy. It wasn’t like Maude to hesitate. When they had leaped off the roof of an abandoned building into a bed of cardboard boxes, it had been Maude’s idea. When they had dropped water balloons onto the backs of Den’s men, it had been Maude’s idea. When they had spent the night together, curled up like she used to with Lily and Jane, but somehow even closer, it had been Maude’s idea. But she wasn’t feeling bold right now, that was clear. Eudora watched as Maude turned toward her; her strawberry birthmark looked brighter, pinker than usual. It was her stoplight, Maude liked to say, and it didn’t like the cold. Eudora thought it didn’t like the forest, either. Kids in Lost Lake liked to make up stories about the lake itself, how it was haunted, but Eudora didn’t believe them, and Maude had never acted like she did, either. Anyway, she’d never even seen the lake. For all she knew, the lake itself might be a myth, no bigger than a mud puddle after a rainstorm.
“How scary can it be?” Eudora said, and urged her horse on. The forest was thick, but there were pathways—roads, almost—that indicated they wouldn’t be the first, maybe not even the first that day. Maude nodded, and squeezed her horse, and into the forest they went.
Dark, empty branches stretched skyward over their heads like the skeleton of a ceiling—all beams and bones, no connective tissue. The leaves were gone. The girls stopped talking, and the only sounds were the horses’ hooves on the dirt, the wind in the branches above them, and their own heartbeats. Eudora knew they weren’t supposed to go into the forest, but it sounded like advice they’d outgrown, didn’t it? She was sure it did. It wasn’t safe for children, of course, but she and Maude weren’t children anymore. They could take care of themselves. She felt bolder with every step the horse took, until a man in black clothing like a uniform without badges or insignia stepped out from behind a great oak and held out his hand to stop them, and as silently as smoke other men in faceless uniforms, each with an ugly automatic weapon in his black-gloved hands, appeared on both sides, and they stopped their horses, having no real choice, and their audacity momentarily shriveled.
Maude gasped, and Eudora reached out to take her hand. Maude’s palm was sweating already. The guards stepped toward them, spooking Eudora’s horse.
“Turn around, girls,” the guard said. Eudora looked to Maude, who had gone completely white. What is she so afraid of, Eudora wondered. They would turn back if they had to, of course, but why was Maude so frightened?
“I’m Den Hale’s daughter,” said Eudora, “and she’s Clancy Munn’s daughter. We just want to see Lost Lake.” She was sure that her father’s name would grant her access to whatever was hidden in the trees.
The guards didn’t smile or soften the way Eudora thought they would. “Turn around, girls, and ride back freely, or we’ll walk you back, like prisoners,” the guard said. “You choose.”
Surprised and slightly shaken, Maude and Eudora rode back through the trees and across the ring road and left the horses in their stables, and hugged each other, and promised themselves that the following year they would figure out how to get to Lost Lake. When they parted at Den’s door, Eudora thought Maude lingered a little bit, the horse’s reins still tight in her hand.
“What is it?” Eudora asked.
“Nothing,” Maude said. She shook her head, as if trying to convince herself. “Nothing.” Then she clicked her tongue and turned around and went home by herself, back to Clancy’s house on the next block. Eudora stayed outside, listening, just in case her friend came back. The following day, when Eudora took the little train back to warmth and Fairlady, a different conductor accepted her ticket, punched it, plodded to the end of the carriage, and disappeared. When Eudora closed her eyes and fell asleep, she dreamed of horses and leaves and men with guns tucked into their waistbands; she dreamed of Maude’s hair blowing across her cheek; she dreamed of a vast lake that stretched all the way to the horizon.
Dawn was waiting when the train arrived, a basket of food hanging from her arm. She’d baked biscuits for the short ride home from the station, and brought some freshly made juice the color of a sunrise.
“How was the trip?” Dawn asked, smiling. Her eyes looked glassy, which could have been from the breeze coming through the leaves and the grass. It was spring again, and there was pollen in the air.
“Good,” Eudora said, knowing that her mother wouldn’t want to hear more. “Fine.”
“If it was good for you, it’s good for me,” Dawn said, and hooked her arm over Eudora’s shoulder and turned toward home. After six months in Lost Lake, Fairlady looked like a film set—there was no trash or leaves in the gutter, no eyesore vehicles, not a broken window or an empty building. Even by the train station, the streets were as clean as if they’d just been mopped with bleach.
“How is everyone?” Eudora asked, expecting more of the same, easy answers to easy questions. She loved her mother, but Dawn didn’t like to go beneath the surface. Everything was always fine, no matter what.
“Lily’s got the bunnies in the living room—there are more of them now, the big one had some more babies. She wanted to show them to you.”
“And what about Jane?”
Dawn didn’t stop walking, didn’t shift her gaze from the clear, even sidewalk. “Jane’s living with her father now.”
Eudora tried to stop, but Dawn kept moving. “What?!” This had happened to other girls in Fairlady, older ones who were as pretty and blond as Jane. One day they’d be at school, practicing their choreographed routines in the hall, all white teeth and unblemished skin, and then next day, they’d be gone. To their fathers, whom no one had ever seen.
“She wanted to, Eudora. Just like you want to live with your father. Doesn’t Jane get to make a choice, too?” Dawn’s voice was as even as the sidewalk, with not a single crack.
Eudora thought of Jane’s whispered pleas, her soft cheek resting against Eudora’s shoulder the night before she left for Lost Lake. That night, Jane hadn’t wanted to go anywhere. Eudora wondered when her friend had changed her mind. “Sure,” she said. “Of course.” When they made it back to the house, all the lights were on and Lily sat in the middle of the living room floor, surrounded by little moving puddles of white fur, smiling as if nothing was different. Even Jane’s mother grinned, so happy to see Eudora home again.
The months went quickly—Eudora went back to school, where she read familiar stories and took familiar tests. She ate her mother’s beautiful, rich food and helped clean the kitchen. Lily stayed close to her in bed at night, the two of them singing the kind of children’s songs that were harmless until you actually listened to the lyrics, which were about hangmen and rotting earth. The summer came and all the playgrounds were full of children. She washed her hair and braided it while it was wet, which left wrinkles of curls behind after it dried, which reminded her of Maude. In the fall, just before Eudora was heading back, Dawn began to pick at her cuticles, which she’d never done before. Once, Eudora was walking by the bathroom and saw Dawn plucking her eyebrow hairs with her fingers, her sharp nails acting as tweezers. Her mother looked completely unlike herself—Dawn looked pale and frightened, but determined, too. Eudora stepped on a noisy floorboard, and Dawn looked up, catching Eudora’s eyes in the bathroom mirror. Instantly her face went back to normal, the corners of her mouth perking back up into a smile. She smoothed her fingers over the reddened stripes over her eyes. “Time for bed!” she said, her voice trilling upward like a happy bird.
Eudora stayed awake on the train—she wanted to know how far it really was in between the two cities. There were tunnels she’d never noticed before, long stretches of time underground. Eudora stared out the window, sure that she would pass something that would explain the difference between her mother’s house and her father’s, between the way she felt in her two bedrooms, the difference between Lily and Jane and Maude.
This time, it was her father who picked her up from the train. He walked up the platform smiling at her, and she took in again that he was actually a small, compact man who moved with a wonderful economy and efficiency you never noticed until he was coming straight at you and you had no choice. Den walked, she realized, like a dancer. He sauntered, he strolled, he more or less glided up to her and hugged her close and kissed her forehead. Her father was just about the same height as Dawn. In a few years, she would probably be taller than both of them. Eudora slid her face into the collar of his old brown leather jacket and, to keep her childhood from vanishing completely away, inhaled the fragrance of Lost Lake masculinity, minus the smell of horses—Den never spent much time in the stables—but with some sharp extra smell like that of a winter evening growing dark. It was the smell, she suddenly felt, of cold water.
“Ah, you’re glad to be back,” he said. “That’s always good to know. And you’re not too softened up from six months in Fairlady, I hope.”
“I’m always glad to be back here,” she said. “Last time, Clancy said it used to take me a couple of days to remember that I really like being in Lost Lake, but when he picked me up I remembered it instantly. This time, too. But when I go there, back to Fairlady, I miss this place so much I think I mope around for weeks.”
All in one smooth, unbroken motion, he hugged her more tightly, patted her on the back, picked up her traveling bag, and began to escort her down the platform. Eudora realized that she had never before said so much about Fairlady when in her father’s world. “Must be hard on your mother.”
“Maybe. But you know Mom, she’s always so cheerful and upbeat. That’s what makes her so wonderful!”
“That’s true,” he said. “Very true. But you always bring some of that cheer to us, you know.”
“Jane must do that, too. She’s here now, isn’t she? My friend Jane Morgan, from Fairlady?”
“I don’t know any Jane Morgans from Fairlady, honey. Sorry.” He smiled at her, then turned to hoist her suitcase into the back of the pickup.
“But . . . she left to live with her father. Mom said.”
Still smiling, Den gestured for her to walk around the cab and get in on her side. “I know a couple of Morgans, and neither of them has a daughter. Abel Morgan is so old he can barely walk, and his son, Jerry, who never married, is a captain in our security force. Your friend probably moved to one of those little towns on the other side of the state, Waldo, or Fydecker, one of those. Or maybe Bates, way south of us, that’s a good-sized city. Probably a ton of Morgans in Bates.”
Den turned on the engine, gave Eudora a reassuring pat on the knee, and twisted around to back up into the aisle.
“Daddy . . .”
“Something else?” He raised his eyebrows.
“Why do you need a security force? Fairlady doesn’t have one.”
“That’s a big question, honey.” For a short while, he negotiated the turns needed to get out of the lot and on the road to Lost Lake. “Fairlady’s a special place. There are policemen, but you hardly ever see them, and the town has next to no crime. We don’t have much, either, but some of that is due to our security force. We’re a much busier place than Fairlady. We do have a jail, and there’s almost always one or two idiots in a cell. All kinds of things go on here in Lost Lake—and besides, this is the North. Things are different in the North. We wouldn’t live in Fairlady if you paid us.” He gave her a look that was both amused and fond. “I hope you’ll feel the same way, next year.”
Here it was, thrust in front of her face like a burning torch, the matter she tried never to think about while knowing it could never be very far from her mind. The judge at her custody hearing had ordered that Eudora would have to decide between her mother and her father, between Fairlady and Lost Lake, by the date of her sixteenth birthday, now only two seasons away. After that, her trips back and forth would cease, and she would become a permanent resident of one city or the other, of her mother’s world or her father’s. There was no in between. This abrupt, unwelcome reminder of the decision she somehow would have to make made her stomach cramp in on itself, and for a moment she feared that she would have to vomit onto the remarkably clutter-free floor of the cab, which Den had almost certainly cleaned up for her arrival.
Some of what she was feeling must have been printed on her face, because her father immediately said, “Shouldn’t have reminded you like that. Sorry. I’m sure your mother feels as strongly as I do about this thing.”
Eudora thought, My mother would never have done that to me. Then: My mother wouldn’t say anything about it even if we were about to go before the judge. Instead, she’d ask how I liked her new brand of oatmeal. Dawn kept everything locked up tight. Too tight, maybe. Eudora inhaled and said, “How’s Maude? I can’t wait to see her.”
“Maude’s probably fine, you know, but she isn’t in Lost Lake right now. She won’t be back before you have to leave again. I’m sorry about that, too. I know what great friends you were.” He used the past tense—were.
“No,” said Eudora. “No, she would have told me. Where is she, anyhow?” A dreadful thought occurred to her. “Did you do this? Did you send her away?”
“She’s on a special trip with Clancy. Town business. She wanted to be more involved! Did I send away your best friend? Of course not. I don’t have the power to do that.”
“In Lost Lake, you can do anything you like. Last year I finally noticed how everyone acts around you. All those men, they need you to tell them what to do. They look up to you. You’re the mayor, or the boss, or whatever.”
“Don’t you think Clancy decides what Maude does, not me?”
“Clancy especially would do anything you told him to do.”
Den frowned at her and without warning swung the wheel sharply to the right, pulling the vehicle off the road and onto the weedy bank. He jerked to a stop, jammed the shift into neutral, and swiveled to face her. His eyes seemed flat, blank, empty. For a second, fear flashed from the center of her chest and sparkled through her nervous system. A gust of cold wind struck the pickup with an audible slap. They were still a mile or two out of town. The nearest building was a little run-down farmhouse about a hundred yards away across an empty field, and it was probably abandoned.
Some feeling came back into Den’s eyes. “Look, Eudora. This is how it goes. All right? Lost Lake doesn’t have a mayor, and there isn’t any boss. When we need to discuss something, we get together, and we work it out. The men in my place, sure, they work for me, but we talk everything over, and everyone has a say in what happens.”
“But what do you do?” she asked.
“About a million different things.” Den paused. “I really thought Maude would let you know, sweetie.”
She felt deflated. “Okay. Thanks. I’m sorry. I didn’t want to make you angry.”
“It takes more than that to make me angry. But if you were thinking, did I send Maude away because the two of you tried to sneak through the forest last year, the answer is no. The guardsman who ordered you back told me about the two of you, however. You were thoughtful enough to give him my name, and he was thoughtful enough to come to me afterward. Lost Lake is dangerous, honey, and so is the forest around it. We keep people away for their own good.”
Eudora felt her face heat up, and she looked away. Her father was lying to her, she was sure of it. There was no way Maude would have gone away without letting her know. There was something off—first Jane, now Maude. Eudora thought of all the girls in Fairlady who had left school abruptly, all the pretty girls who had never been heard from after boarding the train north. Her father knew the truth, but he wasn’t telling.
“Now that we understand each other, let’s get into town and have a nice time, okay?”
“If you say so,” she said.
Eudora looked through her window and watched scrubby wasteland yield to rows of shacks and pawnshops and liquor stores. They drove between two massive strip clubs that faced each other across the two-lane macadam road. Past the neon of the clubs, the town of Lost Lake began to assemble itself and display what it was really about. A street of morose one-story houses with tiny lawns led to a huge brick structure that ended at a square from which narrow roads wound this way and that through and into a clutter of shops, taverns, restaurants and supper clubs, foundries, courtyards and town squares, movie theaters (all but one shuttered), tiny frame apartment buildings, streets of diminutive factories, a cemetery, and finally, the area on the north end of town where stood Den’s huge blank building with concealed vents and hidden windows and multiple entrances, with uncounted chimneys—a building with comfortable living space for twenty people, an underground pool, a shooting range, the library called the “fortress,” a dining room, two kitchens, and all of the hearths, fireplaces, and woodstoves beneath the uncounted chimneys. Described this way, the town sounds enormous, but many of the buildings were of no great size, the streets were narrow, and most of the squares had a toylike quality, not unlike parts of Fairlady. Past Den’s realm lay the tremendous forest, and within the forest glinted the immensity of Lost Lake itself, forbidden to all but a few of the town’s satraps, rajahs, magi, and sultans. Or so Eudora gathered. Maude had promised her to make another foray side by side into that forbidden territory, and that idea overflowed with equal amounts of the fear of capture, the thrill of outrageous adventure, and joy—the blazing joy of sharing both the risks and the adventure with Maude Munn.
It was possible, of course, that Eudora had always liked Maude more than Maude had liked her, that the friendship had been formed out of familial duty. It was possible that Maude was having the time of her life off wherever she was with Clancy, and that if Maude ever thought of Eudora at all, it was with a gentle nostalgia for her childhood, as if she were an old stuffed monkey found discarded at the back of a closet. This consideration had two effects on Eudora: it aroused a sharp, painful shame that seemed centered in her actual heart, and it made her feel that she, too, should move into a more adult phase of her life. Having no choice in the matter, Eudora decided to become a more independent young woman, and took to riding a horse through town by herself; spending hours alone in the “fortress,” reading whatever looked interesting, as long as it also seemed unambiguously grown-up: over a single week, she read Jane Eyre, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and The Bloody Chamber. All the other children in Lost Lake seemed like simply that—children—whereas Eudora herself felt like nothing of the sort. She was somewhere in between the kids and the adults, and therefore profoundly lonely. Eudora had never before really noticed the extent to which she and Maude Munn had split away from the others to create a self-contained, self-sustaining society of two. She could almost imagine that her friend had been protecting her from the rest of Lost Lake.
On Eudora’s tenth night back in her father’s realm, Den and most of his merry men stayed up very late drinking—it was hard to tell if they were celebrating or mourning, the cries and cheers too loud and too blurry for Eudora’s ears to differentiate. Either way, she knew that it would be a late morning for all of them, even the guards. It occurred to Eudora that she would probably never have a better chance all winter to slip into the forest unseen. Without Maude did she dare, did she even want to dare? Lost Lake might as well keep its secrets, she thought. Secrets seemed to be the world’s principal currency.
Two days earlier, she had been dawdling bored past the big conference room, peeked in through the half-inch opening in the doorway, and seen, far back at a little table near the enormous fire that filled the hearth, her father in the act of counting the money he was transferring from a knee-high metal safe on the floor into a bunch of shoeboxes piled up on the side of the table. He was not counting bills, he was counting stacks of money, bundles of cash held together with thick paper bands. Behind him and closer to the fire, an oversized guard in a black uniform without any identifying symbols stood with his arms crossed over his huge chest. The clearest thing about this tableau was that it was not supposed to be seen. A kind of dirty intimacy surrounded it. Eudora had moved away as swiftly and as quietly as she could manage. Yet Fairlady, too, had its dirty secrets. When she sat in her mother’s pretty kitchen sometimes, shelling peas or cutting up sweet potatoes, watching and listening as the older women chattered about nothing much—about trivia, really, half of it in that distant time when they had been girls themselves—the empty space she had begun to notice in the air between people’s words and what they really meant widened and widened until the kitchen seemed an abyss. As Eudora lay in her narrow bed with the dull clamor of drunkenness booming from the floor below, it came to her that she herself, Eudora Hale, was in imminent danger of succumbing to the depths of the empty spaces, and that she could drown in the emptiness, the meaninglessness yawning all about her. She had this one chance, she thought: this one, now. And Maude would be with her, too, she thought, not the Maude who had disappeared into “town business” with Clancy, but the other, more real Maude, her Maude, who had created meaning with a glance of her eye as she beautifully flaunted her flame-licked face and ran straight at any obstacle that dared place itself before her.
Just before dawn Eudora slipped quietly out of bed and put on as many layers as possible, buttoning herself up with trembling fingers. Carrying her boots to avoid making any noise clumping across the floor, she crept along the hallway and tiptoed down the stairs. At the bottom of the staircase was the entrance to a large room with a concrete floor that Den used chiefly to put up short-term visitors. The sounds of snoring and sleepy mutterings told her that this monastic space was not empty. Alarmed, she moved quietly past the half-open doorway and peered in. Something like twenty men lay asleep on cots and pallets, about half of them in the black uniforms of Den’s guardsmen. A stench of flatulence and stale alcohol hovered above the snoring men. Eudora took long, silent steps to a back door and walked outside into fresh, cold air that smelled wonderful to her. The long, flat-roofed stables lay only a few steps on a concrete path away.
Her horse exhaled warm steam onto her palms in greeting, and Eudora stroked his velvet nose, moved down his side, stroking and patting as she went, and like a true girl of Lost Lake vaulted onto his back. With a dig of her heels and a whispered word she urged him forward and stayed flat against his neck while they were still in Lost Lake proper. This was it, Eudora realized with something like shock, she was committed, she would see this through to the end. Never before in her life had she been so flagrantly and willfully disobedient. A ghost-Maude, a shadow-Maude, rode beside her, egging her on with the courage of her own native, utterly out-there flagrancy. That blazing wine-stain on Maude’s cheek had demanded more courage than Eudora thought she alone would ever have.
Disobedient? Very well, I will imagine my Maude at my side, and my disobedience will be root, trunk, branch, and leaf.
As she rode the horse at a steady walk past the shuttered taverns and empty inns that lined the empty ring road, she wondered how her parents had ever met in the first place, how they had been in the same room long enough to make her out of thin air. The number of things that had to align to bring her into being! Maude had had a mother too, years ago, and Jane and Lily had both had fathers. Why did no one get to keep both? Surely they did in some parts of the world. Eudora thought that next year, before she was forced to go before the judge and make a choice, she might jump off the train with a bag full of clothes and food and walk until her new, separate journey took her to a nice town that looked like it might be a good place to live. In this place, parents would not get divorced; it would have neither Fairlady’s well-swept corners nor Lost Lake’s darkness and mystery. Surely such a place existed, somewhere. Didn’t it, didn’t it have to? Yet . . . were she to make her separate journey, instead of losing merely one of the places she already had, she would lose both of them.
Eudora stopped fantasizing about something she was probably never going to do, especially not without Maude, when her horse’s steady, one-foot-at-a-time gait had taken her across the ring road’s wide expanse and up to the irregular row of oak and birch trees that marked the beginning of the great forest. She was at the exact point where she and Maude—so fearlessly, so confidently, so ignorantly—had entered the forest. This time around, she was fearful, uncertain, and aware that normally a squad of the black-uniformed soldiers would be poised and hidden within the trees, ready to pounce. She nudged her horse into a gentle, quiet walk through the first row of trees and into the forest, where the pale, gray light of the northern dawn almost immediately surrendered to the velvet darkness of the long night. All of the soldiers couldn’t have been celebrating with Den, she knew. Probably an equal number had been left at their posts, or whatever they called it. She would have to be a lot cagier today, and softer of step.
The trees seemed sometimes to creep toward her out of the absolute darkness behind them, and sometimes invisible twiggy fingers reached out to dig at her hair, her shoulders, her chest. With better eyesight than hers, the horse did not flinch or panic, but sure-footedly stepped around the thick trunks and lacy deadfalls on their wandering path. If it was a path. In daylight, she and Maude had followed some old trail, half overgrown with fiddlehead ferns, but now she had to leave all of that up to the horse. Eudora’s only function was to avoid low-hanging limbs and keep the animal moving in more or less the right direction.
She lost track of time. Now and then, she brought the patient horse to a halt and paused a minute or two to listen to what was going on around her. In the darkness and without a watch whose dial was readable at night, a minute becomes a very flexible unit of time. Eudora listened to the forest breathe around her, a faint rustle in the leaves, a quick scurry of tiny feet on the forest floor, a bird’s exploratory-sounding call answered or challenged by another bird. Some animal brushed against a tree trunk, and she felt the horse stiffen and shift its legs, and knew it was rolling its eyes in terror. Eudora patted its neck and urged it forward again, grateful not to know what kind of animal it had been, and hoping it was not following them. Then it occurred to her that the animal might have been a human being with an automatic weapon slung across his back. Night vision glasses, and a black uniform with a black hood. Black boots with rubber soles. She let herself be carried another thirty feet, and feeling protected by the darkness no longer, squeezed the reins gently to halt the horse, swung her legs over the animal’s back, and dropped silently to the ground.
A faint gray light was leaking into the darkness. Eudora began moving slowly forward through the ranks of the trees and for a moment had the illusion that they grew in straight military rows that exposed her every time she moved into one of the spaces between the neat rows. Far overhead, a squirrel barreled along a slender branch and yelled in squirrel-speak, I see her! I see her! Here she is, you idiots! She whirled to look behind her, and the forest, as if by command, snapped back into its old disorder. More carefully, she examined the tree trunks, the bushes, the green sprigs that sprouted from the gray-green mulch, straining to see what she could not see: hidden traps, gleaming wires, soldiers with their faces painted to look like moss. “Okay,” she muttered to herself, and led the horse by the reins in the direction she thought she had to go. Ten minutes of patient going later, Eudora heard the unmistakable sound of a group of men moving through the forest with no thought of precaution. She froze; she listened, hard. The men seemed to be coming right toward her from the very direction she was going. Making as little noise as possible, she led the horse behind a deadfall where a huge broken trunk slanted gray and lifeless through a cobwebby tangle of lesser branches entwined with parasitic vines. She knelt down and as the noise came nearer peered out at the space she had just left. Soon a small troop of the guards, weapons slung across their backs, relaxed and clearly in a good mood, entered the space before her and mooched along through it.
When they had passed, Eudora waited a few minutes, then emerged and listened to them passing away from her, now and then saying something she could not make out. It did not have to make sense to her, she told herself, she should merely be grateful they were making themselves so easy to avoid. Then she resumed walking northward again, toward the lake, the horse treading amiably along beside her.
Nearly an hour later, the sun higher in the sky and sending great shafts of pale northern light down through the trees that were greener and taller than those farther back, she felt the ground beneath her feet grow spongy with moisture. The air was colder and clearer, and she thought it smelled like water. Eudora gave the reins a tug and began to move along faster. Before her, a cluster of matter where none should have been—an unnatural shape, a harsh angle, a brown too red to be alive—resolved itself into a sort of shelter, a hut, a shack. A shack with a dark, glinting window and a wood stove’s chimney jutting through the roof. A dark green pickup truck encrusted all over with a rind of dried mud had been drawn up beside it.
Her heart seemed to swing to a stop, then resume after the skipped beat. She thought she knew that pickup. For a moment she could not move. Then: “You stay here,” she whispered to the horse, dropped the reins, and set off, crouching and moving despite her terror toward the rear of the shack and its glinting window. It could not be, it had to be. Of course it was. She remembered walking toward it through a blast of freezing air at the side of the station. Since that night, the pickup had known a lot of bad weather.
The real test of her courage was whether or not she could straighten up enough to peer through the window, and as she scuttled across a resilient carpet of weeds murdered by the cold Eudora wondered what she would do when she got to the red-brown wall. Then she got there, and she knew she had to risk taking a look. The shadow-Maude, the silent, insubstantial Maude insisted on it. Yes. A look, really just a peep, a second’s glance into that enigmatic space, and off to the next big challenge. Such as, for example, trying to get back home before Den noticed she wasn’t in the building.
Very slowly, in fact reluctantly, Eudora came up out of her crouch and plastered herself to the boards next to the window. She inhaled and exhaled, inhaled again and held her breath. It was time. She turned her head, then her whole body, and raised the top of her head and her left eye to the window. Inside the cabin, Clancy Munn sat at a card table, his broad square back to her, counting out bills from one of the stacks Den had been organizing. He placed the bills into three separate piles. Then he waved at someone, telling them to come up to him. Eudora lowered her head again, counted to twenty, then rose up and risked another peep. Two of the soldiers in black were grinning down at Clancy and reaching for the money he was extending to them. Everybody seemed to be extremely happy with the way their lives were going. Payday, Eudora thought, okay, that’s all I need. The guards stepped back from the desk, and Eudora found herself looking at Maude Munn, her radiance considerably dimmed, her face drawn into a scowl, standing there in blue jeans and mud-daubed blue sweater, her hands jammed into the pockets of a dirty-looking duffel coat. She was just thinking that Maude didn’t own that sweater, or that ugly coat either, when her onetime darling and best friend glanced up and looked right into her eyes. Eudora froze, and her mouth went dry.
Maude nodded once and looked down at her father, who gave her a couple of bills and waved her off. She backed away and slid her eyes sideways. When Eudora failed to move, Maude frowned more deeply and nodded her head to the left. Get out of here, she was saying, and Eudora got out of there on the spot. She scrambled, trying to be as quiet as you can be while scrambling, and disappeared, she hoped, back into the trees. When she got to shelter, she realized that along the far side of the cabin had been a stack of the long, narrow black boxes from the train—from her trains and all the others.
No longer quite in control of herself, Eudora moved aimlessly away from the cabin and finally took in that the trees were thinning out and the ground becoming squishier. And directly ahead of her was a glinting, silvery, molten surface that had to be Lost Lake. She glanced back, assured herself that her horse was within reach and not going anywhere, and turned back to the lake that had been her goal all along. It was vast, but she could see across it, dimly. It looked very cold and very deep, like an enormous quarry. Way off to her right, a truck had been drawn up along a wooden dock. Two of the guardsmen were pulling something from the back of the truck and loading it onto a dolly.
Eudora strained to see what the object was, but the men’s bodies obscured it as they pushed the dolly along the pier jutting out from the dock. At the end of the pier, they tilted up the dolly, and something black slipped away into the water and instantly sank from view.
It was enough: it was too much, she needed no more. Eudora stumbled back into the woods, took up the reins, and walked the horse back far enough to feel safe getting on its back again. They plodded through the forest, with every step Eudora seeing before her the shock, as if by flashlight, of Maude Munn’s altered face, the face of a gloomy, altered Maude Munn, older, sadder, compromised, another person altogether. The black thing slid into the lake and disappeared. Something had gone away, gone away forever.
It made no difference to her now, but her luck held long enough for her to stable the horse and get into her father’s terrible building and make her way to her room unseen. No one had noticed she was missing, no one had gone looking for her. Everyone in her father’s employ had been too busy or hungover to notice her absence. She had left muddy boot-prints on her way to her room, but someone would wash them away without ever thinking twice about it. Lost Lake was a muddy place, now and again. Eudora peeled off her clothing and glanced into her mirror to see a filthy body with wild eyes and twigs in her hair glaring back at her as if in accusation.
She fell into bed and seemed to have become disembodied. Being disembodied was fine with Eudora. Her bodiless self rose a foot or two off the bed and became aware that a door, a nice, sturdy red door had appeared in the empty air before her. Behind this door, she understood, was another. It might be larger or smaller, uglier or more beautiful, but it would be different. And after that door would be another, then another, and yet another after that. The journeys opened by these doors were ripe with miseries, splendors, richness and paltriness, with a thousand breathtaking moments and as many of heartbreak and despair, but what she understood most at that moment was that none of these many, many doors would ever lead her back to the first.