Jeanette hurried after, passing a pile of rubble wigged in weeds. It might once have been a small cabin or shed. Here moths covered the branches of the trees, their countless tan bodies pressed together so that they resembled strange barnacles. Which followed somehow, Jeanette thought, understanding innately that the world she found herself in was outside of all she had ever known, like a land at the bottom of the sea. The moths appeared still, but she could hear them crackling softly, as if speaking.
Bobby, they seemed to say. It’s not too late to start again, they seemed to say.
The slope finally topped out. Through the last of the woods, Jeanette could see the fox standing in the faded grasses of a winter field. She sucked at the air. A kerosene scent, wholly unexpected and seemingly unattached to anything, tingled in her nose and mouth.
Jeanette stepped into the open and saw something that could not be. Something that made her sure she was no longer in the Appalachian country she had always known.
It was a white tiger, coat tipped with black, fin-shaped markings. It rolled its head and roared, sounding like the MGM lion. Behind it soared a tree—a Tree—bursting up from the earth in a tangle of a hundred trunks that twisted into a looming, sprawling fountain of branches, dripping with leaves and curling mosses, alive with the flitting bodies of tropical birds. A massive red snake, shining and glittering, coursed up the center.
The fox trotted up to a gaping split in the bole, tossed a somehow roguish look at Jeanette, and vanished into the depths. That was it, that was the tunnel that went both ways. The tunnel that would take her back to the world she had left, the one where Bobby waited. She started toward it.
“Stop where you are. And raise your hands.”
A woman in a checked yellow button-down and blue jeans stood in grass that came up to her knees, pointing a pistol at Jeanette. She had come around the side of the Tree, which was, at its base, roughly the size of an apartment building. In the hand that wasn’t holding the pistol she had a canister with a blue rubber band around its middle.
“No closer. You’re new, aren’t you? And your clothes say you’re from the prison. You must be confused.” A peculiar smile touched Ms. Yellow Shirt’s lips, a futile attempt to soften the oddness of the situation—the Tree, the tiger, the gun. “I want to help you. I will help you. We’re all friends here. I’m Elaine, okay? Elaine Nutting. Just let me do this one thing and we’ll talk more.”
“What thing?” Jeanette asked, although she was pretty sure she knew; why else the kerosene stink? The woman was getting ready to light the Impossible Tree on fire. If it burned, the way back to Bobby burned. Evie had pretty much said so. It couldn’t be allowed, but how was the woman to be stopped? She was at least six yards away, too far to rush her.
Elaine went down on one knee, watching Jeanette carefully as she laid the pistol aside in the dirt (but close at hand) and quickly unscrewed the cap of the kerosene canister. “I already spread the first two around. I just need to finish making a circle. To be sure it’ll go up.”
Jeanette took a couple of steps forward. Elaine snatched up the gun and got to her feet. “Stay back!”
“You can’t do this,” Jeanette said. “You have no right.”
The white tiger sat near the crevice that had absorbed the fox. It thumped its tail back and forth and watched with half-closed eyes of a brilliant amber.
Elaine splashed kerosene against the Tree, staining the wood a deeper brown. “I have to do this. It’s better this way. It solves all the problems. How many men have hurt you? Plenty, I imagine. I’ve worked with women like you for my entire adult life. I know you didn’t just walk into prison on your own. A man pushed you.”
“Lady,” Jeanette said, offended by the idea that one look at her could tell anyone anything that mattered. “You don’t know me.”
“Maybe not personally, but I’m right, aren’t I?” Elaine dumped the last of the kerosene onto some roots and pitched the canister aside. Jeanette thought, you ain’t Elaine Nutting, you’re Elaine Nuts.
“There was a man who hurt me, yes. But I hurt him worse.” Jeanette took a step toward Elaine. She was about fifteen feet away now. “I killed him.”
“Good for you, but don’t come any closer.” Elaine waved the pistol back and forth, as if she could brush Jeanette away. Or erase her.
Jeanette took another step. “Some people say he deserved it, even some who were his friends once. Okay, they can believe that. But the DA didn’t believe it. More important, I don’t believe it, although it’s true I wasn’t in my right mind when it happened. And it’s true that no one helped me when I needed help. So I killed him, and I wish I hadn’t. It’s on me, not him. I have to live with that. And I do.”
Another step, just a small one.
“I’m strong enough to take my share of the blame, okay? But I’ve got a son who needs me. He needs to know how to grow up right, and that’s something I can teach him. I’m done being pushed around by anyone, man or woman. The next time Don Peters tries to get me to give him a handjob, I won’t kill him, but I… I’ll scratch his eyes out, and if he hits me, I’ll keep right on scratching. I’m done being a punching bag. So you can take what you think you know about me, and you can shove it where the sun doesn’t shine.”
“I believe you may have lost your mind,” said Elaine.
“Aren’t there women here who want to go back?”
“I don’t know.” Elaine’s eyes shifted. “Probably. But they’re misguided.”
“And you get to make that decision for them?”
“If no one else has the guts,” Elaine said (with absolutely no awareness of how like her husband she sounded), “then yes. In that case, it’s down to me.” From the pocket of her jeans, she withdrew a long-barreled trigger lighter, the kind people used to fire up the coals in a barbecue. The white tiger was watching and purring—a deep rumbling sound like an idling engine. It didn’t look to Jeanette as if there would be any help from that direction.
“Guess you don’t have any kids, huh?” Jeanette asked.
The woman looked hurt. “I have a daughter. She’s the light of my life.”
“And she’s here?”
“Of course she is. She’s safe here. And I intend to keep her that way.”
“What does she say about that?”
“What she says doesn’t matter. She’s just a child.”
“Okay, what about all the women who had to leave boy children behind? Don’t they have a right to raise their kids and keep them safe? Even if they do like it here, don’t they have that responsibility?”
“See,” Elaine said, smirking, “that statement alone is enough to tell me you’re foolish. Boys grow up to be men. And it’s men who cause all the trouble. They’re the ones who shed the blood and poison the earth. We are better off here. There are male babies here, yes, but they’re going to be different. We’ll teach them to be different.” She took a deep breath. The smirk spread, as if she were inflating it with crazy-gas. “This world will be kind.”
“Let me ask you again: You mean to close the door on the life all them other ladies left behind without even asking them?”
Elaine’s smile faltered. “They might not understand, so I… I’m making…”
“What’re you making, lady? Besides a mess?” Jeanette slid her hand in her pocket.
The fox reappeared and sat beside the tiger. The red snake slithered weightily across one of Jeanette’s sneakers, but she did not so much as look down. These animals did not attack, she understood; they were from what some preacher, back in the dim days of her optimistic churchgoing childhood, had called the Peaceable Kingdom.