“Hey, babe,” he says as he pads into the bedroom of the house on St. George Street she’s now sharing with Tiffany, Janice Coates, and two of the docs from the Women’s Center—Erin Eisenberg and Jolie Suratt. (Erin and Jolie are unmarried. The third Women’s Center doctor, Georgia Peekins, lives on the other side of town, with two daughters who sorely miss their big brother.) Another reason to know this is a dream is that she’s alone in the room. The other twin bed, where Tiffany sleeps, is empty and neatly made up.
The fox puts its cunning forepaws—white rather than red, as if he has walked through fresh paint to get here—on the quilt that covers her.
“What do you want?” Lila asks.
“To show you the way back,” the fox says. “But only if you want to go.”
When Lila opened her eyes, it was morning. Tiffany was in the other bed where she belonged, the blankets pushed down to her knees, her belly a half-moon above the boxer shorts she slept in. She was over seven months now.
Instead of going to the kitchen to brew up a nasty-tasting mess of the chicory that served them as coffee in this version of Dooling, Lila went straight down the hall and opened the front door to a pleasant spring morning. (Time passed with such slippery limberness here; watches kept ordinary time, but there was really nothing ordinary about it.) The fox was there as she’d known it would be, sitting on the weed-choked slate path with its brush of a tail curled neatly around its paws. It regarded Lila with bright interest.
“Hey, babe,” Lila said. The fox cocked its head and seemed to smile. Then it trotted down the path to the broken street and sat again. Watching her. Waiting.
Lila went to wake Tiffany up.
In the end, seventeen residents of Our Place followed the fox in six of the solar-powered golf carts, a caravan trundling slowly out of town and then along what had been Route 31 toward Ball’s Hill. Tiffany rode in the lead cart along with Janice and Lila, grousing the whole way about not being allowed to ride her horse. This had been nixed by Erin and Jolie, who were concerned about the strength of Tiff’s contractions when she still had six or eight weeks to go. This much they had told the mom-to-be herself. What they hadn’t passed on (although Lila and Janice knew) were their worries for the baby, which had been conceived while Tiffany was still using drugs on a daily—sometimes hourly—basis.
Mary Pak, Magda Dubcek, the four members of the First Thursday Book Club, and five erstwhile Dooling Correctional inmates were going. Also along was Elaine Nutting, formerly Geary. She rode with the two lady docs. Her daughter had wanted to come, but Elaine had put her foot down and kept it down even when tears began to flow. Nana had been left with old Mrs. Ransom and her granddaughter. The two girls had become fast friends, but not even the prospect of spending a day with Molly had cheered Nana up. She wanted to follow the fox, she said, because it was like something out of a fairy tale. She wanted to draw it.
“Stay with your little girl, if you want,” Lila had told Elaine. “We’ve got plenty of people.”
“What I want is to see what that thing wants,” Elaine had replied. Although in truth, she didn’t know if she did or not. The fox—now sitting in front of the slumped ruin of Pearson’s Barber Shop and waiting patiently for the women to assemble and get moving—filled her with a sense of foreboding, unfocused but strong.
“Come on!” Tiffany called grumpily. “Before I need to pee again!”
And so they followed the fox as it trotted out of town along the faded white line in the center of the highway, occasionally looking back to make sure his troop was still there. Seeming to grin. Seeming almost to say, There sure are some fine-looking women in the audience today.
It was an outing—a strange one, granted, but still a day off from their various chores and jobs—and there should have been talking and laughter, but the women in the trundling line of golf carts were almost silent. The headlamps of the carts came on when they were rolling, and as they went past the jungle that had once been Adams Lumberyard, the thought came to Lila that they looked more like a funeral cortege than gals on an outing.
When the fox left the highway for an overgrown track a quarter mile past the lumberyard, Tiffany stiffened and put her hands protectively on her belly. “No, no, no, you can stop right here and let me out. I ain’t going back to Tru Mayweather’s trailer, not even if it ain’t no more than a pile of scrap metal.”
“That’s not where we’re going,” Lila said.
“How do you know?”
“Wait and see.”
As it turned out, the remains of the trailer were barely visible; a storm had knocked it off its blocks and it lay on its side in high weeds and brambles like a rusty dinosaur. Thirty or forty yards from it, the fox cut left and slipped into the woods. The women in the two lead carts saw a ruddy orange flash of fur, then it vanished.
Lila dismounted and went to where it had entered the woods. The ruins of the nearby shed had been entirely overgrown, but even after all this time, a sallow chemical smell remained. The meth may be gone, Lila thought, but the memories linger on. Even here, where time seems to gallop, pause for breath, then gallop again.
Janice, Magda, and Blanche McIntyre joined her. Tiffany remained in the golf cart, holding her belly. She looked ill.
“There’s a game trail,” Lila said, pointing. “We can follow it without much trouble.”
“I’m not goin in those woods, either,” Tiffany said. “I don’t care if that fox does a tap dance. I’m havin goddam contractions again.”
“You wouldn’t be going even if you weren’t having them,” Erin said. “I’ll stay with you. Jolie, you can go, if you want.”
Jolie did. The fifteen women went up the game trail in single file, Lila in the lead and the former Mrs. Frank Geary bringing up the rear. They had been walking for almost ten minutes when Lila stopped and raised her arms, index fingers pointing both left and right like a traffic cop who can’t make up her mind.
“Holy shit,” Celia Frode said. “I never seen nothing like that. Never.”
The branches of the poplars, birches, and alders on either side were furred with moths. There seemed to be millions of them.
“What if they attack?” Elaine murmured, keeping her voice low and thanking God that she hadn’t given in to Nana’s demands to be brought along.
“They won’t,” Lila said.
“How can you know that?” Elaine demanded.
“I just do,” Lila said. “They’re like the fox.” She hesitated, searching for the right word. “They’re emissaries.”
“For who?” Blanche asked. “Or what?”
This was another question Lila chose not to answer, although she could have. “Come on,” she said. “Not far now.”
Fifteen women stood in thigh-high grass, staring at what Lila had come to think of as the Amazing Tree. No one said anything for perhaps thirty seconds. Then, in a high, gasping voice, Jolie Suratt said, “My good God in heaven.”
The Tree rose like a living pylon in the sun, its various knotted trunks weaving around each other, sometimes concentrating shafts of sunlight filled with dusty pollen, sometimes creating dark caves. Tropical birds disported among its many branches and gossiped in its ferny leaves. In front of it, the peacock Lila had seen before strutted back and forth like the world’s most elegant doorman. The red snake was there, too, hanging from a branch, a reptilian trapeze artist penduluming lazily back and forth. Below the snake was a dark crevasse where the various boles seemed to draw back. Lila didn’t remember this, but she wasn’t surprised. Nor was she when the fox popped out of it like Jack from his box and took a playful snap at the peacock, who paid him no mind.