California: A Novel (3 page)

It had taken two weeks for Frida to find the bravery to venture into the forest by herself again. When she did, she was vigilant as a hunter and proud of herself for not turning back at every unknown rustle in the foliage. It only took two solo treks for her to get comfortable again. The green world filled her head and cleared it.

But on the day she met Sandy, their first summer out here was quickly turning into fall, and Frida’s initial panic about their isolation had been replaced with a low hum of hopelessness. She barely saw the world around her. Not even five months into the afterlife, and she had turned to chores as a way to cope.

That day she was headed to the creek to wash some clothes. She pushed through the cattails to get to the edge of the water, the canvas bag of laundry bouncing over her shoulder. She should feel like a buffalo, she thought, heading to the water to drink. Instead, she was channeling a cartoon bandit or Santa Claus. As she stepped onto the muddy patch where she would do her soaking and wringing, something moved in the brush a few feet away. She froze. Between the grasses, a flash of corn silk. Barbie hair, Frida thought.

A very small boy popped up from the ground, and she let out a cry. She knew he was real because of the details she couldn’t have made up: hair so blond it was almost white. The small scratches and bug bites on his arms and legs. Freckles all over his face, except his eyelids, which were as white as his hair. The man’s T-shirt he wore like a dress, which read
OFFICIAL PUSSY INSPECTOR
. That made her laugh, and she glanced at his feet, which were bare, calloused into hooves.

“Don’t be alarmed!” a female voice called out.

Frida looked up, and across the creek stood a woman, almost as blond as the boy. She was tall and thin and wore overalls. It didn’t look like she had on a shirt, but it couldn’t have mattered—she looked as flat chested as a ballet dancer. A girl, older than the boy, with long brown hair, hid behind her mother’s legs. She was wearing what looked like a burlap sack, sewn into a jumper.

“I come in peace,” Frida yelled. What was this, some terrible alien flick? She started again. “Who are you?” All at once, she felt electric. They weren’t alone!

Frida turned to the boy again and smiled. He widened his eyes, as if he, too, couldn’t believe there was someone else to talk to. Later, Frida would learn that this was the way Garrett showed his pleasure.

Frida marveled at how quickly Sandy and Jane got across the creek. They knew which rocks would hold them and which ones were slippery with algae and should be avoided. Jane was barefoot like her brother, but Sandy wore hiking boots. Once across, she introduced herself and her two children. Jane was seven. Garrett was three. Up close, Sandy looked older: the face of a woman who worked outside without sunscreen.

“Bo and I,” Sandy said, “we’ve been watching you two for some time. Making sure you were safe.”

Frida nodded slowly. She and Cal hadn’t counted on a family of spies.
Making sure you were safe.
Did that mean they were judging them, or protecting them?

“The birds!” Garrett cried. He was pointing at Frida now, as if he had just figured something out.

Frida raised an eyebrow.

“We took to calling you the birds,” Sandy explained. “As in
lovebirds.
You two sure do like each other.”

In a different context, Frida might have blushed. Instead she said, “It’s cheaper than going to the movies.” She was trying to keep her eyes off Sandy’s chest. Her overalls had shifted in her commute across the water, and one breast, all nipple, peeped out from the bib, its tip long and knobby. It reminded Frida of a caterpillar.

“You’re living in our shed,” Sandy said. She didn’t seem mad, and so instead of apologizing, Frida thanked her for building it.

“I assume you don’t want us to move out. It was empty when we arrived.”

“Oh no, we love that you’re there. It’s where Bo and I first settled. We built that well you’re using, you know. We like the little outdoor kitchen and fire pit you’ve added. I told Bo it was proof of your ingenuity.”

“How long have you been here?” Frida asked.

“Forever,” Sandy said.

That was the thing about the Millers: they never got specific. It was easy to deduce they’d arrived at least seven years before, since Jane was born on the land, but that was as much as Frida could figure out on her own. Sandy and Bo wouldn’t say where they were from, either, though Los Angeles didn’t seem to register much familiarity on their faces, nor did Cleveland, where Cal had been raised. It wasn’t that their speech was accentless but that it shifted, from bland to twangy and back again in a single conversation. Once, Bo wore a Duke shirt, but Sandy said she’d gotten it from a friend, years and years ago. “Be protective of your past,” she finally told Frida. “Our children don’t need to know too much about ours.”

On that first meeting, Sandy told her the names of the fish in the creek. “We don’t know what that one’s called,” she said, pointing to a thin silvery one, “so we call it a princess.” Frida wished she had a Device that worked, to take notes. She hadn’t felt this happy in—maybe ever. Sandy’s eyebrows were light as dandelion fuzz, and Frida loved the surprise of them. She hadn’t realized how tired she’d gotten of Cal’s face.

Sandy offered to help Frida with her laundry, and Frida accepted. Garrett ran up and down the creek, collecting rocks, and Jane stayed to help the women. Frida hadn’t been taking much notice of her until Sandy said in a stern voice, “Hand that over.” When Jane hesitated, Sandy snatched Cal’s red bandanna out of her daughter’s hand. She threw it to the ground as if it were on fire, her eyes squeezed shut.

“You okay?” Frida asked.

“She likes red,” Sandy said. She affected a breezy laugh, but there was something shaky and nervous behind it. “We don’t let her have too much of it.”

“Sorry, Mama,” Jane whispered.

The next time Garrett sped by, Frida tried to keep her voice casual. She didn’t want to freak Sandy out again. “What’s with his shirt?”

“He likes to help forage.” Sandy raised an eyebrow, her eyes going twinkly for a moment. “Pussy is a kind of mushroom.”

Frida laughed until she realized Jane was watching them.

“We find food, in the forest,” the little girl said.

“Cool,” Frida said.
Cool?
She supposed it didn’t hurt, lying to the kids. It wasn’t like Garrett would find out the truth. They could rename everything, if they wanted to.

The laundry was drying by the time Sandy led her kids away, back to their house. Frida practically ran to the shed. Sandy had invited them over for lunch the next day! The route to their house was easy, Sandy had said. With a stick she drew a rudimentary map in the mud. “And we’ve nailed hawk feathers into trees, to mark the trail. You haven’t noticed them?” Frida shook her head.

It took some effort for Frida to convince Cal she wasn’t playing a trick on him. And once he believed her, he was concerned. How did she know they weren’t dangerous? Why had they brought children into this world? “That’s troubling to me,” he said, but Frida wasn’t eager to follow this line of argument. He sounded like her brother when he talked that way—all doom.

“I’m going whether you come or not,” Frida had said, and that settled it.

The Millers’ house would have been impossible to find, were it not for those feathers, and those key phrases chiseled into Frida’s brain: “Turn left at the boulder, walk until you reach two fallen trees, one atop the other, forming a cross. Turn right.” A few times, Frida felt a flash of nervousness that they were lost, but an hour later they pulled back a large branch, attached to which was another feather, tied with turquoise-colored leather, and entered a clearing. Across the field, a house materialized. Frida felt victorious.

Compared with the shed, the Millers’ home was enormous, and durable, its exterior built of stone and wood. The family must have heard them approaching because all four of them were waiting outside the front door.

“Are they getting their portrait done?” Cal whispered. Frida barely registered the comment, so transfixed was she by Bo’s naked face, no beard to obscure it. Cal himself had a thick beard going, the same look Micah had sported when he left for college, as if he hadn’t been raised in a city, as if he’d ever gone camping. She kind of liked Cal’s copper-colored beard, but maybe this Bo could teach her husband how to shave with a knife. What she missed was having the option.

“Welcome.” Bo stepped forward and shook hands with both of them. He did not smile. He was shorter than Sandy but sturdy with muscles, barbed with them. His seriousness took something away from him, Frida thought, his high cheekbones and heavy black eyebrows menacing rather than dignified. And he squinted, as if he’d lost his glasses. Perhaps this was a man who had been broken down by blurriness.

“We’re so happy you made it!” Sandy said. She wore the same overalls but, thankfully, had added a blue T-shirt to the ensemble. She held Jane’s hand, and Garrett was slung on her hip. At Frida’s greeting, the boy rubbed his left eye with a fist and shook his head. “He just woke up from a nap,” Sandy said. The little girl nodded, as if confirming her mother’s story.

Bo invited them inside, and Jane skipped forward to lead the parade. The house was one large, low-ceilinged room, with two cubbylike spaces for bedrooms. They slept in real beds; Sandy and Bo’s had a wooden headboard, and the children slept on what looked like sturdy cots. Frida saw Cal take in these comforts. In the shed, she and Cal had four sleeping bags, which they rotated or layered. No pillows.

“What a place,” Cal said. Later, when he was trying to make Frida laugh, he would refer to it as the Miller Estate.

There were no windows, so the house was dark, but it was surprisingly cool, like a basement. They could open the door for light and air, Sandy explained.

In the middle of the room two mismatched couches faced each other. The setup reminded Frida of a rundown rec center or a home for the elderly gone sadder than expected. Someone had built smaller chairs for the kids, but they looked about as comfortable as birds’ nests: twiggy and sharp. On the rudimentary wooden table nearby, Frida counted two oil lanterns and half a dozen candles.

With Garrett still on her hip, Sandy moved toward the kitchen area. It was just a stone fire pit, and a trashed card table. No chairs. Bo had built shelving into the walls, and on these the family’s dishes and tools were crowded. Frida took note of the plastic tarps, folded on the bottom shelf. She wondered if the house leaked.

“We do most of our cooking outside, or we eat raw,” Bo said. “Smoke from the fire pit in here won’t kill us—there’s a chimney of sorts—but we could’ve designed it better.”

Sandy smiled. “I hope you’re hungry. We’ve got rabbit, just need to put it on the fire.”

Frida squeezed Cal’s hand; she couldn’t remember the last time they’d eaten meat.

“We use snares,” Bo said, and Cal said he’d love to learn more.

Bo offered to show them the root cellar next and the outhouse and their new underground shed, where they were doing their curing.

Despite his initial austerity, Bo treated Frida and Cal with a tenderness that seemed Southern. He often used their names when speaking to them, as if his conversation were a gift. “You see, Calvin,” he would say, “snares can be difficult to build, but they’re quite efficient.” Like his wife, Bo wore a gold band on his left ring finger. So they’d been out here awhile, Frida thought, long before the world really went to shit. Hilda and Dada had given Frida their rings as a wedding present, but she and Cal had sold them not long after.

“You two married?” Sandy had asked her at the creek. No wonder.

With the Millers, Frida felt like she’d fallen asleep and awoken in a bygone era. They could have been pioneers, hitching their covered wagons, staking claim on a new frontier. Manifest destiny bullshit. Or the opposite: with Bo and Sandy, the land outside wasn’t wild and uncharted, something to fear until conquered. No, the earth was to be respected. Only then would it collaborate with you, tell you what it needed and what it was willing to give. And it was willing to give you a lot, if you knew how to ask. It was a lesson in coaxing.

After they’d eaten a meal so succulent and satisfying Frida could have moaned with pleasure, Sandy asked her to follow her back into the house. The men had begun to discuss how to handle larger predators and keep the deer away from food storage and scare off the rare bear that skulked the grounds. Bo had once seen a mama bear and her cubs at the edge of the land; “Imagine if I’d been near them,” he was telling Cal. “They’re just animals and I’ve got a gun, but still, I’m not stupid. They scare me.” It was a conversation Frida thought she should be involved in, but what the hell, she could get a distilled version from Cal on the walk back to the shed. She wished Sandy and Bo would invite them to stay over, but she knew they wouldn’t. Already, Bo had made it clear that they would not be seeing one another all the time. “There’s always work to be done,” he’d said during lunch.

Sandy had grabbed Frida’s hand as they walked into the house. It was as dry as Frida’s own, her knuckles white and flaky. “I guess you won’t be lending me any lotion,” she said, nodding at their intertwined hands.

“I wish. I’m dry as an old lake bed. But I did want to show you this.”

They were like two little girls on a playdate, like Sandy was about to reveal her secret doll collection, her stickers, or her mother’s lacy lingerie. Jane tried to follow them inside, but once they were a few feet into the house, Sandy had turned around and said, “Go to Papa.”

Once Jane was gone, Sandy pointed to the far wall, just to the left of the bed she shared with Bo. Frida had seen the grayish marks earlier, but had taken them to be Jane’s scribbles: the cave paintings of a seven-year-old.

“Go ahead,” Sandy said, and Frida let go of her hand to walk closer.

Of course the drawings couldn’t be Jane’s, they were too far up the wall. At the top, a line of carefully drawn circles, some of them shaded in, others only partially.