Matties lets us linger for hours—we’re picking at chocolate cake and sharing a pot of coffee when I read her my description of how we met, the moment I first saw her in the gallery in her white dress, her pockets filled with flowers. I close the journal, set it aside, finish the cake.
“There’s a house in New Castle,” she says.
“New Castle, Pennsylvania? Is that where you’re heading? Near Pittsburgh?”
“We’ll be safe there,” she says. “Sherrod helped me buy it anonymously a few years ago. It’s meant to be a safe house, someplace to hide. It could work for a little while—”
“When they killed him, they took his Adware,” I remind her. “They’ll know what he knew—”
“Sherrod was careful,” she says and I want to say, Not careful enough, but let the obvious slip past.
We leave Elko the next morning, sharing the drive to New Castle—we eat Bob Evans or IHOP for every breakfast, pushing through the days and staying at whatever Express hotel we come to when we’re each too tired to drive. Albion loops audiobooks through her Adware to the stereo—she prefers centuries-old books, Longfellow and the like, Tennyson and Shakespeare. We make it through Jane Eyre twice. We listen to old French music as the evenings descend—acoustic jazz and folk, Carla Bruni and Boris Vian. When she’s asleep I shut down my Adware and just listen to the radio, country twang through most of the country, or stations filled with evangelism, but I listen to that promise of God’s love because even those preachers’ voices are easier to take than the silence, when all the death I’ve been hounding coalesces and hangs in my thoughts like butchered meat.
Night by the time we drive through Ohio, the landscape changing to something as forgotten but familiar as my mother’s voice—flatlands giving way to the warp of fields and the hills that will become the mountains of what was once Pittsburgh. We cross into Pennsylvania. We reach New Castle late—I pull in the driveway and cut the engine, the sudden lack of sound and movement dragging Albion from her reverie. I switch off the headlights and we sit looking at the place—the aluminum siding, a dead crab apple tree in the front lawn, untended bushes close against the front porch. No electricity and no heat, so we bring flashlights and set up camp in the living room. Albion paces the hallways. I hear her footsteps on the hardwood, hear her footfalls creaking upstairs across the ceiling, hear her coming back down the rickety stairs. She screams, but by the time I run to her she’s already laughing—she trains her flashlight to the kitchen wall just above the electric stove, illuminating a smiling pig’s face that had been spray-painted there some time ago, loopy eyes and a lolling mouth, the words Welcome home! scrawled in a speech balloon.
• PART III •
WESTERN PENNSYLVANIA
8, 18—
New Castle, Pennsylvania—about an hour, maybe an hour and a half, outside of what the EPA maps out as the Pittsburgh Exclusion Zone. PEZ, it’s called. New Castle was a mill town once, the industrial machinery and warehouses sprawling along the bank of the Shenango in disuse now since Pittsburgh. The houses sag and are worn like cardboard boxes left in the rain. Downtown must have been vibrant once in a long past decade, the newest building now a Sprint wireless store, but otherwise we’re left with a Giant Eagle, a Dollar Blowout, a Kentaco Hut, a Dairy Queen only intermittently open. There are rumors we’ll get a Walgreens sometime soon. Just down 65, a little closer to Pittsburgh, is PEZ Zeolite, but the money from all those government cleanup contracts hasn’t flowed to New Castle—most of it’s gone up to Youngstown, far enough away from the exclusion zone for the cleaners and engineers to settle their families. There’s a Walmart not too far away in Ohio, and on weekends we have a farmer’s and flea market in the school parking lot. Albion’s house is on the outskirts. She bought the place for cash—she said it only cost the equivalent of a few months’ rent of her loft back in San Francisco. A two-story Victorian with claustrophobic rooms and warped hardwood floors. I bought a bookcase for Albion but had to prop up the front with folded towels because the living room sags so deeply down from the edges to the center. The kitchen’s a work in progress with mildewed wallpaper to peel, cabinets to repaint, a floor that needs a fresh layer of sticky tiles or maybe just stripped back to the hardwood. I’ve tried to paint out Mook’s graffiti pig with several coats of primer, but the damn thing still shows faintly through. There’s an acre or so of patchy yard before the neighbor’s fence. We have a garage made of cinder blocks and a few pines in the back.
Tracking Albion in the Archive gave me a wildly inaccurate impression of the woman I’ve come to know—now I realize that all her interest in fashion and design, which I took only as something artsy, is a symptom of a larger rage for order and self-reliance. She makes all her own clothes, by and large, and cooks every meal—I haven’t had takeout for weeks, but she’ll go to Dairy Queen with me for sundaes. She jogs several miles before dawn and by the time I get up and pour my first cup of coffee, she’s already out tending her garden, a twenty-by-twenty patch of vegetables we use for cooking. I sometimes wander out with my coffee and sit on a folding chair to watch her, helping only when she wants help. A few months ago she’d washed out the black dye she had when I first met her in the gallery—her natural hair’s no longer the startling crimson I’d known from the Archive, but a chestnut shade of red that seems brown in the dim but like changing autumn leaves in the light.
Every Sunday morning Albion drives us south into the wildlife refuge and we walk for hours along the trails—muddy paths and creeks cutting through underbrush, ugly reedy groves and metal signs warning not to drink the water for fear of radiation or animal contamination, scum-skinned lakes with mucky swathes meant as beaches. Miles and miles, the kind of woods I grew up with—nothing majestic, just Ohio and Pennsylvania scrub, but Albion finds charm here. She knows birdcalls and identifies flitting shadows I’m never quick enough to see. She’s a good hiker, she drives our pace—I often fall behind, heaving for breath and sweating, and when we hit upward slopes my knees crackle like damp sticks breaking and I figure I’ll need to lose even more weight or my joints will just give out some day, but I’m happy to try to keep up with her.
Sometimes I lose patience with my trepidation and broach questions about her past. “You once mentioned that you and Peyton were sometimes sent out to recruit other girls,” I say on one of our hikes, working to keep my wind, to match her gait.
I never know if I’ll push her away when I ask questions like these—I’ve lost entire days to her silence when I’ve overstepped—but over the past few months I’ve come to believe that Albion wants to talk about the raw areas of her life, only it’s difficult for her. She’s guarded herself with strict boundaries, and seems to weigh each exchange she has with me against her vulnerability. I’ve learned that talking at the house about anything other than our life together is off-limits, but that she’s much more willing to talk candidly when we’re in these woods—I don’t know if it’s because she feels protected or removed out here, or if she feels a sense of grace in nature that turns her confessional.