Lorna nodded and wiped her eyes on her sleeve. “We’ll see how much money he has after my lawyer gets through with him.”
Miranda smiled. It was thin and pained, but a smile. She shut the door behind her. Lorna curled into a ball on the bed. The revolver fired, its report muffled by the thick walls of the cabin. She imagined the black holes in the white paper. She imagined black holes drilling through Bruce’s white face. Pop, pop, pop.
——
Miranda brought Lorna to a stand of trees on the edge of a clearing and showed her the hunting blind. The bloody sun fell into the earth and the only slightly less bloody moon swung, like a pendulum, to replace it in the lower black of the sky. “That is one big, bad yellow moon,” Miranda said.
“It’s beautiful,” Lorna said. “Like an iceberg sliding through space.” She thought the fullness of the moon, its astral radiance, presaged some kind of cosmic shift. Her blood sang and the hairs on her arms prickled. It was too dark to see the platform in the branches, but she felt it there, heard its timbers squeak in the breeze.
“Been having strange dreams,” Miranda said. “Most of them are blurry. Last one I remember was about the people who used to live around here, a long time ago. They weren’t gentle folks, that’s for sure.”
“Well, of course not,” Lorna said. “They stuck a deer head over the fireplace and skinned poor, hapless woodland critters and hung them in the trees.”
“Yeah,” Miranda said. She lighted a cigarette. “Want one?”
“No.”
Miranda smoked most of her cigarette before she spoke again. “In the latest dream it was winter, frost thick on the windows. I sat on the bearskin rug. Late at night, a big fire crackling away, and an old man, I mean, old as dirt, was kicked back in a rocker, talking to me, telling me stuff. I couldn’t see his face because he sat in the shadows. He wore old-timey clothes and a fur jacket, and a hat made out of an animal head. Coyote or wolf. He explained how to set a snare for rabbits, how to skin a deer. The dream changed and jumped around, like dreams do, and we were kneeling on the floor by the carcass of—I dunno what. A possum, I think. The meat was green and soft; it had been dead a while. The old man told me a survivor eats what’s around. Then he stuck his face into that mess of stinking meat and took a bite.”
“That’s a message,” Lorna said. “The great universal consciousness is trying to tell you—us—to adapt. Adapt or die.”
“Or it could be a dream, full stop.”
“Is that what you think?”
“I think it’s time to get our minds right. Face the inevitable.”
“The inevitable?”
“We’re never going to get away,” Miranda said.
“Well, that’s a hell of an attitude.”
“I saw that van again. Parked in that gravel pit just down the road. They’re watching us, Lorna.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
“Don’t worry about those bastards. They’ll be dealt with.”
“Dealt with? Dealt with how?” Lorna’s mind flashed to the revolver. The notion of Miranda shooting anyone in cold blood was ridiculous. Yet, here in the dark beyond the reach of rule or reason, such far-fetched notions bore weight. “Don’t get any crazy ideas.”
“I mean, don’t worry yourself sick over the help. Nah, the bigger problem is your husband. How much time is Bruce going to get? A few months? A year? Talk about your lawyer. Bruce’s lawyer is slick. He might not get anything. Community service, a stern admonition from the judge to go forth and sin no more.”
Lorna winced. Stress caused her leg to throb. The cigarette smoke drove her mad with desire. She stifled a sharp response and regarded the moon instead. Her frustration dissolved in the presence of its cold, implacable majesty. She said, “I know. It’s the way of the world. People like Bruce always win.” She’d called Orillia earlier that evening, asked her how things were going at the new school. Orillia didn’t want to talk about school; she wanted to know when she could see Daddy again, worried that he was lonely. Lorna had tried to keep emotion from her voice when she answered that Mom and Dad were working through some issues and everything would soon be sorted. Bruce was careful not to hit Lorna in front of their daughter, and though Orillia witnessed the bruises and the breaks, the sobbing aftermath, she seemed to disassociate these from her father’s actions.
“There are other ways to win.” Miranda was a black shadow against the dead silver grass. “Like you said—adapt or die. The old man showed me. In the beginning you need a prop, but it gets easier when you realize it’s all in your head.”
It was a long walk back through the woods. Dry leaves crunched beneath their shoes. They locked themselves into the cabin and got ready for bed.
Lorna’s dreams had been strange as well, but she’d kept quiet. She wasn’t open about such things, not even with Miranda. The ghost of old man Haugstad didn’t speak to Lorna; instead, her dreams transported her to the barren slopes above the tree line of the valley. The moon fumed and boiled. She was a passenger in another’s body, a body that seethed with profound vitality. The moon’s yellow glow stirred her blood, and she raced down the slope and into the trees. She smelled the land, tasted it on her lolling tongue, drawing in the scent of every green deer spoor, every droplet of coyote musk, every spackling of piss on rock or shrub. She smelled fresh blood and meat-blacked bone. There were many, many bones scattered across the mountainside. Generational heaps of them—ribs, thighs, horns, skulls. These graveyards were secret places, scattered for miles across deep, hidden caches and among the high rocks.
Lorna stroked Miranda’s belly. Miranda’s excess had melted away in recent days. She was lean from daylong hikes and skipped meals, and her scent was different, almost gamy, her hair lank and coarse. She was restless and she whined in her sleep. She bit too hard when they made love.
Miranda took Lorna’s hand and said, “What is it?”
“I’m afraid you’re going to leave.”
“Oh, where the fuck is this coming from?”
“Something’s different. Something’s changed. You weren’t honest about where you found the coat. The skin.”
Miranda chuckled without humor. “Let sleeping dogs lie.”
“I’m not in the mood for cute,” Lorna said.
“My sweet one. I left out the part that might . . . frighten you. You’re skittish enough.”
“I’m also not in the mood for twenty questions. What did you mean earlier—the old man showed you?”
“Old man Haugstad told me where to look, what I needed to do.”
“In a dream.”
“Not in a dream. The day I discovered the blind, a coyote skulked out of the bushes and led me along the path. It was the size of a mastiff, blizzard white on the muzzle and crisscrossed with scars.”
“I don’t understand,” Lorna said, but was afraid she might.
“We’re here for a reason. Can’t you feel the power all around us? After I lost Jack, after I finally accepted he was gone, I pretty much decided to off myself. If I hadn’t met you at that party I probably would’ve died within a few days. I’d picked out the pills, the clothes I intended to wear, knew exactly where it was going to happen. When was the only question.”
Lorna began to cry.
“I won’t leave you. But it’s possible you might decide not to come with me.” Miranda rolled to her opposite side and said nothing more. Lorna slowly drifted to sleep. She woke later while it was still dark. Miranda’s side of the bed was a cold, blank space. Her clothes were still piled on the floor. In a moment of sublimely morbid intuition, Lorna clicked on a flashlight and checked the spare bedroom where Miranda had taken to hanging the fur cloak from a hook on the door. Of course the cloak was missing.