In Wilderness Read online

  A daisy. Have a happy day.

  Slowly, deliberately, she licks the tip end of her finger, picks up a white petal-pill, brings it to her tongue like a communion wafer.

  “He loves me.”

  Licks her finger, brings up another petal-pill.

  “He loves me not.”

  “He loves me,” from the bright yellow center.

  From the blue stem, “He loves me not.”

  “Who loves me? God?”

  Blue pill. “He loves me not.”

  Rakes the remaining flower into her left hand, gulps it down with water from a glass on the night table, and—mildly surprised, one rarely knows at the outset where any choice might lead—stretches out on her brass bed to die.

  Considers pulling up the covers should her feet get cold, decides it won’t be necessary.

  She has always loved this bed, one of the few items of furniture in the house that she herself picked out and paid for. The rest Tim brought home, leftovers from his redo of the agency. Bauhaus in agencies was trendy not so long ago; now it’s dated. Poor Tim. Some things about him can still make her sad.

  She raises her head, looks around the familiar room. How long has she been lying here? Shouldn’t she at least be feeling drowsy? Except for a slight swelling, a slight itchy swelling, in the roof of her mouth, nothing has changed. Children are playing in the street, riding in those little pedal cars. Pleasant sound, children’s voices. Girl and boy from two houses down, she’s seen them often. Her own child, had he lived, would be about the boy’s age.

  What if these children are who find her body?

  How awful that would be.

  The itchy swelling in her mouth has spread into her throat, begun to gag her. She runs for the bathroom, heaves up colorful Valium sequins into her bright white toilet.

  Stands up, rinses her mouth—should have known pills wouldn’t work, she vomits everything—then goes into the kitchen and puts on a pot of coffee, brings in the morning paper off the porch. It’s Friday, the paper comes rolled in its want-ad section. She pours her coffee, sits on a stool at the kitchen counter, stares down vacantly at the lines of tiny type. Reads them because they’re what’s in front of her.

  1961 Corvair, excellent condition, 8,000 miles. She has no use for a second car.

  Free kittens, 10 weeks old, guaranteed cute and sweet. There’s a phone number. Maybe she should have a kitten; sweet, fuzzy kitten to take her mind off dying.

  Don’t be stupid. Poor little thing’ll starve beside your corpse.

  She shakes her head to clear the image.

  For sale: Splendid forest isolation. Rustic mountain cabin adjacent to national forest and sizable private wilderness preserve. Outbuilding; acreage with meadow, garden spot and pond. Three-hour drive. Nicer to think of than a starving kitten.

  She sighs, drains the last of her coffee, gets up and takes the otherwise unread paper to the den, drops it atop a stack of newspapers in a copper bin near the fireplace. She needs to get to the office before people start to wonder where she is. Bright, creative people with their whole lives ahead of them—people who, if they knew what she was facing, could not comprehend it.

  DURING THE TWO WEEKS she’s been dying, which is how she’s come to think of them, she’s turned into a master at delegating. It’s what she does best. Doles out pieces of responsibility—one here, one there—until they’re all gone and she can stare out over her uncluttered desk to her office door that’s always closed these days and try to think of nothing. It’s all she has stamina for anymore. She’s begun to feel much weaker, and her everything’s-just-fine charade has grown harder to maintain. She gets to the agency later in the mornings, leaves by early afternoon. Has said she’s “working on a project.” No one asks her what it is. No one asks her anything; the agency evidently runs quite well without her. Amazing how one can attain a status so high he (or she) is of no use at all.

  At home, as in the office, she mostly spends her waking hours sitting in the den and staring straight ahead. Nights, she’s learned sufficient sleeping pills and Valium will, by God, take her where she wants to go: into oblivion. It’s late November, turning cold. The heat that blows through the floor registers is never enough this year to keep her warm, no matter where she sets the thermostat. Probably something to do with her dying—the next phase of the process has to start somewhere. She’s taken to building evening fires in the den’s stone fireplace. Then she lies on the sofa and tries, or at least pretends to try, to read—that age-old prescription that’s supposed to take one’s mind off things. Thrillers. The only books fast-paced enough to stand a chance at holding her attention. Books filled with characters who die, often violently, which for some perverse reason she finds comforting.

  Tonight’s a good night; she actually kept down a little food. She twists up several pages from her stack of newspapers to get a good fire going. Used to gather pinecones for this purpose; there are always lots of pinecones in the backyard. Front yard, too—one more thing she and Tim had loved about this house was all the trees. She doesn’t gather pinecones anymore. So much easier to just use newspapers, watch them catch the fatwood, watch the logs begin to burn. Her stack is dwindling. The pages in her hands are weeks old.

  For sale: Splendid forest isolation. Rustic mountain cabin adjacent to national forest …

  A ring-shaped coffee stain puckers the page. She remembers how it got there and the first time she read the ad. Reads it again. The words, the picture they create, leave something peaceful in her mind. Later, for a while at least, she will think how easily she might have missed seeing the ad, and will feel then, for an instant, as if she is free-falling from some great height.

  What she does the next day in her office—behind her closed door, at her uncluttered desk—astounds her: She phones the listing agent and asks if the property is still available.

  She’s buying it as an investment, won’t need to look at it, she tells him. At her insistence the closing comes immediately, the week before Christmas. If she’s lucky, she still has five months—or what portion of that time she can endure.

  SHE HAD NOT EXPECTED dying at such a relatively young age to be awkward, unseemly, cause for embarrassment and shame. Or that it carries with it a perceived self-centeredness, a seeming lack of concern for those one leaves behind. How to tell them at the agency, all those bright and lively people, most younger than she, that, yes, dear innocents, death is about to come for me, as it will come someday for even you?

  She puts it off well into January. Then comes the meeting at Pantheon Scientific. Client’s office: vertical blinds, thick gray carpet, no color anywhere, and everything smelling oppressively new. Dry heat whooshes from one ceiling vent, faint music from another. Slivers of three o’clock sun slant straight at her from between the sharp-edged blinds. She moves her chair to dodge them. Other shards come at her from a different angle. The storyboards shake in her hands.

  It’s finally happening. All the wild terrors she has held at bay in darkness for so long are bounding free into the daylight. Now. She is watching the workings of her body slow, like dancers on a run-down music box, watching the walls cant toward her and the solid floor ripple beneath her feet. The heat, the piped-in music, something, steals her breath. In a moment she’ll be retching up on the client’s new gray carpet and/or lose the memory of her name.

  “I’m sorry. I feel unwell.”

  She hands the storyboards to the most senior of the junior partners, rises, cracks her shins on some part of the table, runs out of the room.

  KATHERINE SELLS HER CONTROLLING interest in the agency to that most senior junior partner, tells them all she’s lighting out for California—it seems a fitting euphemism—and that she’ll be in touch. Then, because she fears her poor lie won’t stand up to scrutiny, she sneaks in on a Saturday, when the whole building is deserted, to collect her things. She really only wants the wall hanging she bought after Tim left, an abstract, hairy thing that, like a fireplace, warmed her
for a while; but she can see now it’s too large to take where she is going. She stands in front of it and traces with a fingertip a vibrant hunk of scarlet wool that meanders over and under silk strands the color of spiders’ webs—then yanks the weaving off the wall, sinks with it to the floor. She buries her face in its coarse fibers for what must be a long time. When she gets up, her eyelids are sticky and swollen. She brushes off her clothes, smooths out the weaving, hangs it back up on the wall. Has said good-bye.

  On her way out, she runs her fingers across familiar names lettered in stainless steel on doors she passes, names of people she will never see again. Outside, the light has changed. The rain has stopped; an unforgiving wind whips cloud remnants across a cold blue sky. A piece of newspaper sails low, past iridescent puddles rippling in the street. Unaccountably, she smiles.

  THEY GAVE HER SEVEN Polaroids at the closing: a small stone cabin (photos of all four sides); a privy with an attached woodshed (the “outbuilding”); a small meadow, backed by brooding evergreens, that might once have held a garden still encircled by a rusty fence; and a pretty, cattail-bordered pond. She takes these photos out of their manila envelope several times a day and touches them—delicately, as one might touch a talisman. At least as often, she reads the description on her deed, stares at the plat as if by some obscure magic such staring might allow her to project herself into that place that she has not yet seen. She grew up in a downtown Atlanta apartment seven stories off the street, spent summers in Chicago with her grandparents, has never in her life come closer to a forest than the dark splotches she’s seen from airplanes. This tract of land she’s purchased is the most exotic place she might have strength to get to, and then only once.

  If she can wind up her affairs and be there by mid-February, she’ll have at most four months. On her good days she haunts bookstores, libraries, hardware stores, comes armed with lists, specifications, questions written on lined paper. Reads with interest the few books she finds on wild foods, healing herbs, survival in the wilderness, buys four small, useful paperbacks. Each choice brings her departure closer, makes it seem more real.

  She buys a sleeping bag, commissions a clerk in the Army Surplus Store, a tanned young man who looks like he spends time outdoors, to reinforce its underside with leather (his suggestion) and to make a harness for it she can slip her arms into. Then she can pack it full of her belongings, drag it the two miles the agent warned she’d have to hike in from the road. The young man is proud of his work. When she comes to pick it up, he helps her fit her arms into the harness and strap it on. The process soothes her: his firm, competent hands. Except for medical examinations and procedures, she has not felt the touch of anybody’s hand for a long time. Some things one must not think about. Known things, like someone’s touch. Unknown things: nursing a baby at one’s breast.

  At home she tramps around wearing her harness, dragging her new sleeping bag behind her to get used to it; she buys a dozen bricks to gradually increase its weight. Her days are filled with preparation. Nights, she sometimes forgets her pills: Her sleep’s improved from sheer exhaustion. No time for tears, or fears, or anything but what she has to do.

  SHE BUYS THE GUN last, asks for the smallest one that’s powerful enough to kill a human being. The gun store clerk, somebody’s too-blond grandmother in too much lipstick, assumes she wants it for protection. She does, but not the way most people think. A Smith & Wesson with a four-inch barrel is what the grandmother recommends. The name conjures Saturday cowboy movie matinees. The gun itself looks more like it belongs in old black-and-white gangster films.

  The grandmother leads Katherine through a padded door into an indoor shooting range in the back of the store. There Katherine takes one shot at a man’s black silhouette on a large piece of paper that’s hung on a wire some twenty yards away. The grandmother has to press Katherine’s finger where it curls around the trigger so that she can bear to pull it, bear the proof that she holds in her hands an object with the power to kill, intentionally or by accident, a human being like herself. Even then she doesn’t hit the silhouette, hardly hits the paper target. Knocks off a small piece of the upper right-hand corner and that’s all.

  Stands there jangled, terrified.

  “You’d best aim low,” the woman says. “Ready to go again?”

  Katherine shakes her head. “I know it works.”

  Because the woman won’t sell them to her individually, she buys a tiny, very heavy box packed tight with bullets. In the parking lot, Katherine opens the box, takes out six of the bullets, can’t justify more considering their weight, drops them in her coat pocket. That’s one for each chamber in the gun, a reasonable number. In case she misses. Or has second thoughts and has to try again. She leaves the box with the remaining bullets at the back door to the gun store, gets into her car and drives away.

  THE HOUSE SELLS QUICKLY, to a young couple who plan to paint it Restoration blue and then have children. From what Katherine sees of them, she envies them in a desultory sort of way and also likes them, is pleased on her house’s behalf that they are moving into it. Hopes they will take care of the hollies and nandinas, something Tim never bothered with and that she’d lacked the energy to do. Goodwill picks up her furniture, clothing, household items, even her brass bed, the day before she has to leave. At the last minute she takes off her pearl earrings and her gold watch, tosses them in one of the bags of clothing; where she’s going she will not be needing them. Alone in the empty house, she calls out “Hallooo,” the way a child might, just to hear the sound of it. Thinks how she should have stayed, died in a hospital like everybody else.

  Too late now.

  Before dark she gathers together everything left in the house, all the items she plans on taking with her, lines them up on her bedroom floor in the order she will pack them: a thin blanket, wrapped around the gun; five-pound bags of beans and rice; tin plate, cup, knife, fork, spoon; two small, lightweight cooking pots with lids, nested with a screwdriver and nails; hammer, hatchet, axe; two heads of cabbage, two winter squash; a picnic-size pasteboard salt shaker. And in her small backpack an extra flannel shirt, jeans, sweater if there’s room, if not she’ll wear it; socks and underwear to last three days; one pair of sturdy shoes, or perhaps these would be better in the sleeping bag; one nightgown; one large bar of soap for washing everything (dishes, clothes, herself), dishcloth, washcloth, towel, toothbrush, a small tube of toothpaste; three rolls of toilet paper.

  These are the things one needs in order to survive.

  If surviving is the thing one means to do.

  One could say that depends.

  One supposes.

  She will also pack her four paperback guidebooks: Weeds and Wildflowers of the Southern Mountains, Eastern Trees, Surviving in the Wilderness, A Child’s Book of Forest Animals—had wanted a Complete Shakespeare or something similar to read, but feared there wasn’t room; and a steno notebook to write in, plus three cheap ballpoint pens. Finally, she will carry matches in one pocket to make sure they stay dry; and in the other pocket, her six bullets—if left to bounce inside the sleeping bag, or maybe even in her backpack, they might perhaps explode. Odd the things one doesn’t think to ask about.

  Scattered through the house it had all seemed a great lot, perhaps too much to fit inside the sleeping bag and backpack. But here in front of her it makes a small, vulnerable pile. Outside, the sun has not yet set—in these last weeks she’s grown acutely conscious of the lengthening of days. A car screeches to a halt at the end of the street, with a sound like fingers skidding on glass. She picks up the hatchet, its wooden handle the color of dark honey, its steel head as smooth and cold as jewelry. The guidebooks are already thumbed and softened from use; the tinware gleams dully. A few good things. With which she will live out the remainder of her days.

  She curls up in the sleeping bag, then lies there rigid—what if she wakes too ill to go? Hours before dawn, she rises, packs the sleeping bag and backpack, loads them in the back seat of
her yellow Mustang, a car for a bright future, bought last spring in an excess of hope. Her breath smokes in the cold air. The driver’s-side door’s familiar squeak prompts—what?—not actual memories involving the car but memories she wishes she’d had, and she cries a little going past the quiet houses one last time. Driving up the freeway ramp she experiences an optical illusion: For a moment her windshield frames only the still-dark sky, as if she is barreling straight into the stars.

  BY THE TIME SHE turns off the state highway at the tiny clapboard grocery she remembers very little of the drive she has just made, which is not unusual. But seeing the turnoff road is asphalt, she panics. What if it’s nothing but a scam—the Polaroids, the deed, the whole thing? Or what if there really is a cabin, but it’s surrounded by other cabins in some sort of fish camp place or something? What will she do? She might truly have to go to California, God forbid.

  But soon the asphalt turns to gravel, then to dirt, and finally to ruts, and she can feel herself relax, quits holding on to some part of her breath. Dry canes of underbrush claw at her car from both sides, and bare, black tree branches meet overhead. In summer this would be like driving in a cave. The ruts continue for some time, then after a long curve the Mustang slams into a laurel thicket.

  End of the road.

  Katherine wrestles her canvas sleeping bag from the back seat, slips her arms through its harness, then straps on her backpack, locks her car, and heads for the bright orange surveyor’s tape the agent tied around a maple tree to mark the trail. Once she unties the tape and drops it in her pocket it’s as if the trail has disappeared, and for a moment she fears she is already lost. Even though she’s just a few feet from the little bank where it begins, she has some trouble finding it and, when she does, walks forward tentatively, conscious of her heavy burdens and the uphill climb.