“We just found a second level,” Marvin said. “Underground bunker complex. And a map.”
“What is it? What you used on me?”
“Amphetamine—it’s past its sell date, so it may not work too well. But there are a couple hundred of those things out in front of the cabin now trying to get in. We’re going to need your help. Your daughter is in the hall.”
“Is that the pounding sound, them?”
“Yes,” Marvin said.
Lacy rushed into the room, threw herself on her father and burst into tears. “Oh, Daddy—Daddy!”
They held each other for a long time without speaking.
* * *
Pregnancy had changed Marie Collier. Only nineteen in her eighth month, she had become touchy, hypersensitive to odd things: loud cars, or loud people in restaurants, especially the loud new City types who were starting to come up from New York and LA, building outrageously expensive summer mansions. The locals called them Fun Hogs. Pregnancy had made her extremely volatile, as it did some women. She would burst out crying for odd reasons, once because she and Quentin had driven past a kid in a wheelchair who was trying to keep up with his brothers and sisters on a dirt road. The profound unfairness of life overwhelmed her. And she was physically restless, so she would walk out after lunch that summer—sometimes straight down the quiet country road that led to town, and sometimes toward the mountains behind the Collier ranch, taking a trail that had an inch of soft dust from horse’s hoofs.
Sometimes, when she was lonely, she’d cross the fields that separated their place from Chuck Phelps’s place. Phelps had shown her a complete understanding of all her fears: fears that their child would be born with a congenital illness (because her sister was autistic), or ugly (a secret irrational fear). The more she visited, the more she chose to visit. No matter what she told Chuck, he understood and never judged her, or acted surprised. She’d sworn him to secrecy about her visits. When she and Quentin had crossed Chuck’s path in town that summer, he’d never once mentioned them. It was as if they’d been having an affair—a sexless one.
* * *
“Now,” Chuck said, “I’ll probably never have kids. I’m getting old.”
“Yes, you will,” Marie had said. “You’ll find someone. I know you will.”
“No. Who would want me? I’m nuts. Even I know that! And you need a woman for that—right? I can’t just make one in the woodshop.” They’d both laughed.
“Thanks for not saying anything to Quentin about me coming out here. He worries about me walking out in the woods alone,” she said. “You’re a mess.”
Chuck had wood chips stuck to the hair on his chest.
“Do you get lonely?” Marie asked.
They were sitting out in the field in front of the cabin he was building. He’d brought out some cookies, gingersnaps he’d made himself, and ice-cold lemonade. They were sitting on a blanket. She took a bite of a cookie. “Did you kill people, Chuck? Is that the problem, why you want to be alone? I just come over here and talk about myself. You must be bored as hell of me.”
“No. I would miss your visits,” Chuck said. “Yes, I killed people.” He poured himself some lemonade. “I killed people who deserved it, and a lot of people who didn’t.”
“But it was war. You did what you had to do,” she said.
“I suppose,” he said. He had a far off look in his eyes. “My mom asked me not to go. She was a Quaker.”
“Really? I didn’t know that,” Marie said.
“Yup. I broke her heart when I enlisted. I don’t think she ever forgave me.”
“Why did you do it? Join?”
“I think I was afraid I wasn’t going to be a man if I didn’t do it. Stupid kid stuff. Come on, I want to show you something, but you have to promise not to tell anyone. This is my secret,” he said and stood up. “Promise?”
“Yeah. Lips are sealed.” She reached for his hand and held it like a little girl holding her father’s hand. “I like to hold hands,” she said. She reached over and hugged him and heard him start to cry. She held him and let him cry.
Exactly a month later she had a perfect baby girl. They walked through the field to the foundation of the cabin Chuck was building. He pulled a canvas off the center of the cabin’s foundation and exposed a network of tunnels and subterranean rooms he was digging below ground. Some of the tunnels went out beyond the perimeter of the cabin’s foundation and along the gravel driveway heading to the county road.
“Wow!” Marie had said in a low voice. “You did that by yourself?”
“Yeah, I know,” Chuck said. He smiled from ear to ear.
One of the tunnels went out and toward the field behind the cabin. “What’s that one for?” she asked.
“Oh, that’s for ambushes,” he said. “Yeah, had to rent a pneumatic jackhammer, ran into some mighty big rocks out there.”
Marie kept Chuck’s secrets. He was always invited to the family’s Thanksgiving dinners over the years. Her Thanksgiving dinners were picture-perfect affairs, always full of people and children and life. She’d been able to talk to Chuck when he came to visit her at the hospital toward the end. They never spoke of her illness, not once. Instead they reminisced about that summer Lacy was born, when she’d come to visit him.
“I brought you a key.” Chuck had told her that last day in the hospital. He dug in his pocket. “It’s for Quentin and the girls, and you, too,” he’d said.
She’d reached for it. The key was attached to small wood figure of a fish.
“It’s coming soon,” Chuck said.
“What’s coming, dear?” she’d asked. Marie took his hand and held it as she’d held it back then, twenty years before.
“The—something. I feel it now. It’s close. I had a dream. I won’t be there, but it’s important—the cabin—for Lacy and Quentin. They were there, in my dream, and they were safe. We were—” He couldn’t bring himself to finish the sentence: in his dream he and Marie were spirits, watching her family from the top of the cabin’s roof. Chuck and Marie could see it all, but their loved ones couldn’t see them.
“What about Sharon?” Marie asked.
“I don’t know. She wasn’t there—in the dream. It was winter and I saw them there in the cabin, Lacy and Quentin. Will you tell Quentin to keep it with him, the key to my place?” Chuck said. “Please. He won’t understand if it comes from me. He thinks I’m a nut. But I know you’ll understand. You always understood me. You’re the only one who did. It’s important.”
“Yes, I’ll tell him. Chuck, I believe you. And I love you. You know that.”
Chuck Phelps had cried only one other time as a grown man, on the day he realized he was in love with another man’s wife and would never, ever, have her, or a real life. He cried a second time, holding the hand of the woman he loved. He sat with her until she fell asleep and a nurse chased him out of the hospital room. He’d driven back home in the summer twilight, in a dull trance, full of regrets. He wished he’d never gone to their shitty war. It had ruined his life.
Two days later, at two o’clock in the afternoon in the small community hospital in Nevada City, Marie dreamed of herself walking out, pregnant and hopeful and fearful all at once, on a hot July day, years before, watching the afternoon’s splendid painting of the sky’s beauties: the pines’ tops moving slightly in the warm breeze, the smell of those pine trees in summer, the confusion of the forest floor as she picked her way toward the Phelps place. She felt herself speed up, walking faster, something waiting for her. She felt/saw herself climb up onto an old stump, holding her precious round belly from which a daughter would emerge soon. She glanced behind her, back toward her home with its new shiny metal roof, put on that summer by her young husband. She thought she could hear Quentin hammering.