Ruin Falls (13 page)

“Those look good,” she said.

Jill turned her own head and nodded. “Lia did a great job. That cloth is all hand-cut.”

Lia was their intern, a student recommendation from Paul. Liz got up and lifted a jar of rhubarb compote. A piece of calico encircled its lid, tied off with a length of organza. The jar’s heft was pleasingly solid. These would do well at the weekend markets, and there were other possibilities, too. Restaurants, B&Bs.

“Liz,” Jill said from behind. “I know this isn’t exactly comfortable territory for you, but can I ask what you’re going to do?”

Liz walked back to the table. “What do you mean, not comfortable territory?”

Jill stared at her blankly. “I didn’t think that was going to be the controversial part of the question.”

Liz fisted her hands on her hips.

“Come on, Lizzie. You’re great at putting the plants in, getting them to grow, but who came up with the financing, the client base? Who decided to open Roots as a business in the first place?”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

Jill dabbed off her forehead with a cloth. “I just mean that you’re not exactly the decisive one. The doer.”

Liz grabbed her glass and took another drink, aware that she was trying to disguise the flush rising on her face.

“Which is fine,” Jill continued. “Except that now you’ve got a family to put back together again. And this time, you can’t ask Paul.”

No amount of alcohol could hide the stain now. The best friend she’d been hugging a few minutes ago suddenly seemed deserving of a slap. Liz would’ve delivered it—was stepping forward, feet a little loose from the whiskey—but then she realized she didn’t have an answer to the question.

“I don’t know,” she said, turning around in the small space. She picked up a different jar. Pickled asparagus spears, and gingham instead of calico. “I have no idea what I’m going to do.”

“Can I make a suggestion?” Jill asked, standing up also.

Liz looked at her and nodded.

“I know that nobody can understand a marriage from the outside. And it’s not like I have any experience in the area anyway.” Jill shrugged, then began to fan her underarms beneath the thin straps of her tank. “Man, is it hot.”

“Yes?” Liz said, half-impatient, half-annoyed.

Jill looked at her.

“Marriage?” Liz prompted.

Jill stopped fanning. “You just never seemed to—know Paul all that well to me. He called the shots, and you either went along with them, or did your best to hide that you weren’t going along with them.”

Liz thought of the treats Reid lifted from other kids—how his sleight of hand might even be explained by all the things that were forbidden him and Ally—and what she herself kept hidden from Paul in the day-to-day. From sports the kids played that awarded meaningless, plastic trophies machined in China to the bottled water that was served at games.

“And Paul was kind of there, coming down every now and again, but otherwise not really all that available. At least, that’s how it looked from where I sat.”

Liz felt anger rise. From where Jill sat. They both knew where that was. “So?”

Jill lifted her shoulders. “So maybe a good place to start is by getting to know him, really know who he was. I guess that’s what I’m saying.”

Someone stepped into the room, and they both looked up.

“Do you need something, hon?” Jill asked.

Her son was a big, hulking boy, man-sized at not quite fourteen. He stared at Liz.

“Do you remember Aunt Liz?”

Liz had diapered this boy, and driven him to enough Cub Scout meetings, hockey practices, and church sermons on Sundays that he used to call her car the limo.
Lizomine
he’d said once as a preschooler, delighting both Jill and Liz, and the coinage had stuck.

Andy shook his head back and forth. “Hello,” he said politely to Liz.

“Hi, And.” Liz swallowed the nickname when he stared blankly. “Hello, Andy.”

He walked over to the coffeepot.

Jill stood up. “Not at night. Remember? It keeps you awake.”

After a slow beat, Andy stepped back. He opened the refrigerator and took out a carton of milk, which he seemed to drain in a swallow. Until six months ago, he used to access Liz’s fridge in the same casual, unconsidered way.

“Goodnight.” Andy turned and left the room, steps sounding deliberately outside.

Jill and Liz’s replies echoed back.

“No change?” Liz asked quietly.

He had been injured during last year’s hockey season. The team wasn’t scrimmaging or even doing drills, just skating around after practice, when Andy tripped and went into the boards. Head injuries could be a freak thing. Jill—and Liz by trickle down—had learned enough about concussions by now that they could suggest changes to the NHL.

Jill shook her head. “He’s still holding at seventy-five percent, which leaves holes. Newer stuff usually, but in Andy’s case it’s a mix.” She spoke with clipped heat. “It’s okay. We’ve got him on this new regime—massive doses of fish oil—and it really seems to be working.”

Once Jill would’ve snorted over the idea of alternative medicine the way she laughed about mothers who wouldn’t let their kids watch TV on a playdate. But desperation drove you to new places. Liz understood that now.

“Well, that’s good,” she said. Wondering darkly, as if tonguing a sore spot, who had it worse. Was it better to have your children in some unknown location, but presumably doing okay? Or some carved-out version of the child you’d raised?

Jill nodded, three rapid times.

Liz felt a surge of sorrow as she stood. “Andy looks good. Still growing like a weed.”

Her best friend gave her a smile whose ingredients only Liz would have recognized. Love, and remembrance—for the days when his size was the one worrisome thing about Andy—and a bitter, jerking regret.

“Yes,” Jill said. “He does keep doing that.”

Liz hugged her before going out into the gathering dark.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

T
his time when she got out of the car, Liz approached the house from the side instead of the front. As she walked, her nose filled with a peaty scent, and she caught a glimpse of curling leaves.

Something was overgrowing the fence. Liz walked over to take a look.

The farm occupied two acres at the rear of the house, signaled by a painted sign hanging from a fence post.
Roots
.

Before there was a business, this was just Liz’s solitary garden, penned to keep out the deer. Then Jill had begun to help. She proved to have not only a thumb green enough that the plot had quadrupled in size, but also a head for business. Soon the two of them were producing small but viable crops never before seen in the brutally brief Adirondack growing season. Poona Kheera cukes and micro-greens like mizuna and tatsoi, papery-skinned tomatillos and mulched asparagus as pale as vanilla ice cream.

The pursuit had married well with Paul’s knowledge about resilient ways of planting, methods that weren’t dependent on commercial fertilizers, yet that extended the growing season to nearly year-round. Paul had consulted as two room-sized cold frames were built, and soon Liz and Jill had far more bounty than they were able to ply neighbors and parents and teachers with.

They began turning their extra wares into pickles and jams and
spreads, jarring them prettily, and before long they needed Lia to help with the overload.

Liz unlatched the gate and stepped past the mesh fencing onto a winding path. She braced her hips with her hands and took a look around.

It was the height of the season, and she and Jill had been spending four hours a day just staying on top of the weeds. In Liz’s absence they had proliferated; the crops would be impacted if this hogweed and loosestrife and bittersweet couldn’t be beaten back. Liz made a mental note to charge Lia with the task. Their intern didn’t come from a farming background as most of Eastern Ag’s students did. Lia was part of a new wave of farming hopefuls, young people for whom the pursuit was part avocation, part art. And as such, she wasn’t fully acculturated to the life; the constant, changing needs of its cycle; and its twenty-four/seven chokehold.

Aware of hunger for the first time all day, Liz reached down and peeled a leaf of sweet cabbage from a closely clustered head. She chewed as she walked down the rows, making sure vines wound upward, snapping off any withered or overlarge stems from the varieties of kale.

She brushed dirt from her hands. A pocked moon had risen in the sky.

She was avoiding going inside. Jill’s words had left a harsh and bracing taste in the back of her throat, but they had also given Liz an idea.

In the mudroom, she stepped out of her shoes.

Then she climbed the stairs and went into her husband’s office.

Paul was an academic and the spaces he occupied reflected the role. While Liz devoted most of her time to being outside, Paul spent the same stretches cooped up. That was why indoor spaces always felt cluttered; their occupants were trying to push against unnatural bounds. Outdoors there was an endless offering; here Paul had been constrained by a desk and shelves and some spillover onto the floor.

Liz crouched down, fanning through piles of journals before reaching for some more. They gave off a meteor shower of dust and she sneezed.
Journal of Independent Farming. Permaculture in the Larger
Culture
. Tracts on genetic modification—its potential risks—and lengthy exegeses about the misuse of corn in ruminants and fowl. There was a journal that focused solely on the process of making soy protein isolate.

Nothing Liz wasn’t used to hearing about, so frequently that the words had turned into a vague background thrum. This had been the bread and butter—the sprouted wheat and flax oil—of Paul’s daily life.

She made neat stacks out of the volumes she’d looked at, two or three towers, then rose and crossed to Paul’s desk. He hadn’t taken his laptop wherever he had gone. She flicked on the machine, removing a stack of books from the chair so that she could sit. The dark was growing oppressive, pressing in from the hall, and Liz turned on a lamp.

She watched the computer boot up. It was an older machine; Paul spurned the latest upgrades as he did most forms of consumerism. He believed that the endless succession of new products was worse than a mere play for money; he saw it as a way to acclimate people to a life of constant consumption.

Over the churning of the hard drive, Liz heard some sort of rapping, and went out into the hallway to check.

There were windows along the hall, but a tap on one of them wouldn’t have been audible from the study. Liz went downstairs, pulled open the front door, and stepped onto the porch in her stocking feet. The moon gave a silvery glow to her car, but there was no other vehicle visible. Nobody was around. The evening had finally cooled off; the lighter air was a relief.

Liz went back inside, pulling the door shut behind her.

She peered into the living and dining rooms, then checked the kitchen and mudroom just to make sure, but they were each empty. Liz did something then that she couldn’t recall doing in all the years she had lived and gardened and raised children here. She turned the lock on the mudroom door. It swiveled slowly, unused to movement, before settling into place with a decided
clack
. Liz went back to the hall and latched the front door as well.

She walked upstairs, feet padding. At the top, she turned and
looked down, leveling her shoulders. She’d never been scared in her own home, scared anywhere really. But fear was a constant companion now, and the house’s grasp around her suddenly felt suffocating. Liz couldn’t escape the dread awareness of whatever might be happening to Reid and Ally, and even that was just a blind for the worst fear of all: that she would never see her children again.

Paul’s machine had booted. She used the mouse to start surfing the web, clicking the History button as soon as it appeared. The column that came up was blank.

Liz closed the browser and tried again, frowning, but the same thing resulted.

Had Paul scrubbed his search history? She checked—all of his emails had been deleted. Fully deleted, not just sent to
Trash
.

Paul had flipped the interior security lock, failed to fool the police, and allowed himself and his companion to be seen by the bellhop. But in this sector at least—as with his cell phone—he’d evinced some shrewdness.

Which had to mean there was something on the computer he didn’t want her to see.

A pall of hopelessness settled over Liz. For a man who spent his days immersed in text, a digital trail had seemed likely to point in some direction. If it was blank, Liz didn’t know which way to turn.

And then she noticed an icon for another search engine. She clicked it, and a tab popped up on the screen.

W
ELL, THIS IS EMBARRASSING
, it said. F
IREFOX HAS CRASHED.
W
OULD YOU LIKE TO RESTORE YOUR LAST SESSION?

Paul hadn’t cleared his history; he’d just been using a different browser. And deleted emails notwithstanding, his ambivalent relationship with technology had allowed him to miss the fact that the Internet had crashed while he was in the process of shutting down.

Whatever Paul was doing the last time he’d been at this computer could be resurrected.

Liz let the arrow float over the options.

Yes
, she clicked.

THE CHAT ROOM USER

M
adeline Jennings sat on a huge purple bouncy ball in the waiting room. This office was brand-new, a softer, kinder breed of doctoring, and Madeline had fallen in love with it at her first appointment. In addition to the balls, which were supposed to prepare you for labor, there were ergo-something chairs she could actually get out of on her own, even at thirty-six weeks, with her belly as big as one of these balls. Women who already had children could let them wander off to a dedicated play space, close enough to keep an eye on, far enough away that the moms would get a little break. Madeline could imagine how appreciated that must be.