This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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eISBN: 9781542037457

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Published in coordination with Plympton Literary Studio

016.

Avaunt! Sam crept up the slope of the ravine to peer into the back windows of neighbors’ houses with her night vision goggles. These fragments seen, never unseen, added up to other people’s lives. Here, a sad couch covered in sleeping cats, there, a coffee table with a half-built model of a sailing ship. A figurine in a curio cabinet, misshapen and unknowable, most likely a grandchild’s kiln misfire.

Trivial, but she could not bear another breach of security, given how she had washed up here. She needed to know the secret lives of the neighbors so that she could anticipate them, know things before ever they came up the driveway with their apple pies, their cherry pies, their fruitcake. For their protection, but also for her own protection. Besides, the haunting of houses was her due, Sam reasoned, as someone who lived alone now and found in solitude a kind of ghosthood. She was wraith already, so why not wander?

At the crest of the ridge, from someone else’s narrow deck, her gaze swept back to take in her new house, or her father’s old house, to be more precise. Wedged there, amongst the canopy of trees, everything reversed in shadow, in light. So far distant it appeared. So fragile.

Seeing the house that way, from afar, her appetite for further criminality fell away, and she, too, fell away in a sense—staggering back down the slant of the ravine, through underbrush and cedar mulch of uncertain provenance, holding the goggles in her left hand and using her right arm for balance. She hadn’t expected to feel the incline in her calves and thighs, but it was a satisfying feeling, like she’d put in a night of hard work. It balanced out the fading high of the illicit, this afterlife, her heartbeat back to normal, the pulse in her ears silent again. Why did it feel so glorious, to sneak around?

The stepladder she had positioned next to the six-foot chain-link fence near the bottom of the ravine looked like some gymnast’s practice equipment in a light less shadowed than before, so she used it that way this time, vaulting over with only the slight jingling of the metal links. The world tumbled and righted itself, exhilarated; the thickness of the air, the humidity, the ceaseless sound of cicadas and katydids brought everything close and immediate.

Once on the other side, safe, Sam felt a strange reluctance to return to the house, to end the adventure. So she didn’t.

It was just past dawn, and she lingered at a massive sweet gum trunk that lay like a wooden bed on her property. It cradled moss and lichen and fragrant vines. The tree must have been hundreds of years old before it had fallen in some storm.

She made her way to the sweet gum cradle, lay down there against that ridged, be-mossed surface, tried and failed to keep her eyes open. A bed of wood beneath her, the brightening sky above, and she between, possessed by secret knowledge of her sins.

She’d told herself the night goggles would just be to look at wildlife from the deck at night. But that was a lie. The ghost in her had always meant to buy them for the purpose of spying on people.

That’s just what ghosts did.

015.

The thud and crack came so sudden, felt in her body so hard that ethereal left her for a moment. The way the reverberation shook the sweet gum trunk, which Sam had found so solid. For a moment, she thought she’d been awakened by an earthquake and looked toward the house, expecting to see the upper level and deck toppling into the ravine.

But no: someone had cut down a huge tree, she realized. A half-dream memory of hearing chain saws in her sleep, dismissed as loud-buzzing flies, swatted at half-heartedly. The shock waves still disturbed her flesh, as if she had fallen to the forest floor, too.

The sound had come from somewhere just west. She left the goggles on the sweet gum trunk as damning evidence best abandoned, brushed leaf debris from her hair, then threaded her way through elderberry bushes taller than her and a flurry of young black cherry trees. Soon, Sam stood at the edge of her property on the western side, facing the easement that ran along the edge of the fence line.

In front of her, through the glaze of new sun, lay a scene of devastation. An enormous pine tree had been cut at the base, allowed to topple over the fence and into the easement. The trunk, with a crown of massive branches, had slanted through the neighbor Geraldine’s property and into Sam’s, across the dry creek bed. Not far. In falling, the pine tree had taken out a swath of understory trees so that harsh light fell to the forest floor in places it had never been allowed before.

Something about the injury of this. Something about the intrusion of it stole breath, focused attention in a hypnotic way.

When Sam did register that a man was approaching, she knew immediately this was the person responsible. Tall, lanky, wearing one of those breathable button-down shirts fishermen wore, with the vent in the back, and blue jeans. The hat that sat atop his narrow features turned him into a cowboy, as did the toy gun stuck through the gate in his fence. She couldn’t tell his age—anywhere from a hard fifty to a well-preserved sixty-five.

He grinned at her cadaverish, with a glint in his eye that she interpreted as excitement. Tree destruction as entertainment in an otherwise dull life. While behind him she could see the wide stump of the pine tree, the men with chain saws were already gone. Sam did a quick calculation involving the steep slope and math that did not add up. The pine could never have fallen on the man’s house.

“Zanth,” he said. “Zanth Peters. Welcome to the ravine.”

Her anger intensified at the thought of starting with pleasantries. Also, the suggestion that he already knew all about her.

“Why?”

“Because it’s my name, ma’am,” and that carious grin again that she would never equate with good humor.

“The tree,” she managed to say. She was still feeling its death in her body, couldn’t forget the force of that.

“Hurricane’s coming,” he said in a good-natured way.

The look on her face must have read like puzzlement to him.

“Trees like that fall in hurricanes,” he explained.

Wasn’t it as much about wind tunnels and whether a tree was healthy or not? She despised his certainty.

“I mean, it’s fallen on my property. You didn’t ask. Look at all the trees it took with it. Did you even ask Geraldine?”

A dismissive look at the mention of Geraldine, and Zanth spit to the side. “Geraldine doesn’t mind nothing down here these days. She gave up a long time ago.”

“Well, I didn’t. I just moved in and now I have to deal with this . . .”

She felt there was a larger issue, but Zanth’s calm flustered her, as if she was in the wrong. Zanth’s certainty hid a weakness, but she couldn’t deny it also served him as armor.

“Easement,” Zanth said. “Most of it is on the easement anyway. City owns the easement.”

“The easement is only the first thirty feet from the fence.”

“Miscalculated, sorry.” He spat again and turned to walk back up the slope.

“Hey!” she called out like an order.

Zanth spun to meet her stare in a way that almost frightened her.

“I’ll have somebody take it off your property, don’t worry,” he said. “Didn’t even know you’d moved in yet. It’s the ravine. No one builds down here. Too steep. One dead tree I don’t have to worry about anymore is a blessing. You’ll learn about what matters, living here, or you won’t.” A curious emphasis on matters she couldn’t quite grasp. “But that’s not my problem. Now, I’m going back up to my house, and you’re welcome to walk the easement all you want, but if you ever come onto my property, I’ll call the police. And also—you might want to turn your backyard lights on at night once in a while.”

Insult to injury. Not only was he the reasonable one, she was the bad neighbor.

Zanth turned once more and walked fast up to his house, past all the pathetic lilies and generic bushes he’d planted to shore up that absurdist idea of a lawn at such an extreme angle.

On some feral level she admired how he had dismissed her and her concerns, but on all others he just registered as an asshole.

She wanted to jump the fence and follow him up the slope. She wanted to take the fight to him.

But, in the end, knowing her own impulses stopped her more than anything else. The thought of the gun in the kitchen drawer. Empty of bullets, as she’d vowed it would remain now.

If you did what she had done, you didn’t have a right to bullets anymore.

014.

For a time, the house had calmed her anxiety after the incident and the collapse of her marriage—not just the escape to the house, but the house itself, as a unique creature. How it wasn’t just being somewhere else that helped, but somewhere so different, so it was difficult for the overlay of memory to terrorize her. Her husband, Tim, the calm, rational college professor, might have been tempted to come find her, but not here. It was too far away. She wasn’t even sure he’d make the connection; he might have thought she’d already sold the place.

Her dad had bought the house decades ago, lived here for five years, and then left abruptly. He survived in part off the renters and in part off his petty crimes. She’d never known him well enough as an adult to guess his motivations, least of all why he’d left the house to her when he’d died. Estranged, strange daughter, have the place I abandoned with speed in the city you never knew.

But as it turned out, Sam loved how the three rectangular blocks that formed the structure hugged the ravine slope like three massive steps, and how, within the top two levels, the open concept made everything flow, bright and airy. She loved the high ceilings with crosshatched cedar beams and the windows that lived up there, with such a generous relationship to sunlight and moonlight both. How the walkways leading to the house and the upper deck wound around corners and all the bushes and trees, like she lived in a nature center. How it was furnished so generically, by the various renters post-Dad, that she could glean no trace of him, which felt like a blessing.

But, still, blessing or not, the dread rose up in her at unexpected times. She would be cutting a broccoli head and the knife would slip. No, not the knife. The knife and the cutting continued, but something inside slipped and it felt like the knife had slipped. But what was sharp in one instant became unmanageable in the next. The knife had slipped, but the cut wasn’t in her hand.

Once the feeling was so acute Sam cried out and dashed the knife into the sink, fell back against the counter behind her, and looked for blood on her hand that would never be there. Instead, there was the slow release of a pressure in her brain, a stress hidden. Had she been alone for too long? Had she been talking to herself for too long? Was it a kind of hallucination or infection?

Only months, not years. She had to remember that, but couldn’t quite hold on to it.

When she began to choke, she slowed her breathing, found her way to a chair, and sat there, taking in deep breaths. Sam shuddered, and it was a convulsion like violently wringing a rag dry, and then she was still. Not the incident at the old house. Not her husband’s silence, so much louder than yelling.

Some other, new thing, rising to the surface, out of the ravine.

013.

Working in the yard felt like relief or distraction. Geraldine, the widow next door, had suggested helping when she saw Sam working in the front near the mailbox, and it felt like about as much connection as Sam could manage. She didn’t think about Zanth Peters at all, or only a little, as they added and subtracted from the limestone garden running along the eastern edge of the house. Geraldine’s initial silence helped, as Sam was tired, still suffering a partial insomnia that had her up two or three times a night.

She decided to appreciate rather than find annoying the Latin music station blaring at them from the roof of a house across the ravine, where workers were repairing a hole. She decided to embrace the shortness of her breath as a sign she needed the exercise.

Sam’s arms ached and she was sweating from the humidity, but she also got satisfaction from building something, and the limestone garden definitely was a kind of fortification. Up against the shadow of the cement-block foundation of the house, the garden absorbed and slowed stormwater, and diverted it away from the house into the dry creek bed.

Now they were using trowels to move aside a few of the stones to pack in a bit more dirt, and using that to put in giant columbine, sword fern, and maidenhair fern, while removing black cherry seedlings. She knew the birds had planted the seedlings with their poop, which she found amusing and thought of each time she pulled one.

She took pride in how Geraldine seemed impressed with her gardening skills. She’d honed them over the past year, when she’d suggested to Tim at the old house that a task they could do together might help. It hadn’t, and he’d lasted outdoors for maybe three weeding sessions. But in the process the idea of “rewilding” and helping pollinators and birds had caught fire in her imagination after reading an article in the newspaper.

After a half hour of silence, Geraldine squatted on one knee to grab some water from an old-fashioned canteen she’d brought and swept her long white hair out of her face. She was a thickset woman who, in a flattering way, suggested linebacker as a former profession, and although she said her sister had lived with her until a year ago, her demeanor suggested she’d been alone much longer. Sam’s mother had passed away when Sam was twelve, and it felt comforting, or comfortable, to know someone who had seen more of life than her college friends.

Also comforting: not needing to explain herself.

But as if Geraldine could read her thoughts and didn’t like being typecast, the woman asked, “Married?”

Blunt like that, when she did speak.

“Not anymore. Divorced.” Close enough.

Geraldine considered her, apparently thought forging ahead made the most sense. “And what do you do?”

“Do?” Something about the emphasis made the question incomprehensible.

“What’s your job?”

“I’m a freelancer now.”

“What kind of freelancer?”

“Consulting,” she said.

“Consulting about what?”

This was turning into a real interrogation, but somehow it put a smile on Sam’s face. With Geraldine, she’d never have to worry about a single moment of passive-aggressiveness.

She stopped working and sat cross-legged in the pine mulch next to the edge of the limestone. A snail oblivious to her and Geraldine scrawled across part of a rock that was already covered with emerald moss. Were there words it wanted Sam to consider?

“I fact-check scientific documents,” Sam said. “And do analysis. Some of them are used to create public policy.”

She didn’t want to explain she had a comfortable amount of money because, for a long time, she hadn’t worried about what a company did, just what they would pay. The new work was all for nonprofits and didn’t pay as much.

Sam felt another question rising in Geraldine’s thoughts. “What do you do?” she asked to forestall whatever it might be.

“Did. I do nothing now.”

“Well, not nothing. Gardening isn’t nothing.”

Geraldine just snorted.

“Did, then?”

“Health-care profession. I liked helping people, until I didn’t like helping people. I put in my time and I did what I could, and then I retired early.”

This was the most Geraldine had ever said at one time, and Sam considered her for a moment. Did the number of words signify importance or some rote answer she’d pulled out so as not to be more forthcoming? It was a question much on Sam’s mind.

“It stimulated my brain,” Geraldine added.

“And this doesn’t?”

She snorted again, rose off her knees to consider the downward slope. “That’s different. What pleases a person. Isn’t it? What gets them up in the morning?”

“This place does the trick,” Sam said. “It’s beautiful. You want to come in afterwards for ice tea?”

Geraldine had not been inside, kept begging off, and now, predictably, said, “Oh, I’m too sweaty for that, but thanks.”

She stared at something Sam couldn’t see down in the ravine. Or off into space.

“Did you know my father?” The question just popped out. Geraldine might not have—he’d only lived at the house for a few years before renting it out. When he’d died, Sam hadn’t renewed the last renter’s lease, expecting to sell. But instead, she’d killed someone and lived here now. It took everything she had not to blurt that out over Geraldine’s reply.

“It sure is beautiful here,” Geraldine said. “And a lot of history here, but you’ll learn that part. No, I didn’t know your father. He kept to himself. In the timeline of the ravine, he wasn’t here long enough to know.”

She bent to pick up her trowel with such deliberate slowness Sam wondered if Geraldine was nursing an injury. But then she spryly got back to work on putting in the ferns. End of conversation, and they continued on in their respective silences.

About twenty minutes later, Sam’s trowel hit something in the dirt that screamed and she recoiled in horror, fell back on her butt.

A mole? Some other living creature? The idea of having hurt or killed an animal repulsed her, went against how she had decided to live now.

But Geraldine was laughing so hard she was crying—as pure a sound as Sam would ever hear from her.

“Squeaky toy,” Geraldine said. “Next-door neighbor had a dog that buried them all over. Get used to it.”

012.

Squeaky toys were just one mystery about the ravine Sam couldn’t have anticipated. But to get to the heart of others, Sam had placed trail cams in the backyard for security. A photo or video felt like a better solution than the gun in the drawer.

Instead, during that first month, Sam was rewarded with a steady stream of wildlife sightings: opossums, raccoons, and even, sometimes, an armadillo, like a relic of a bygone era. She felt a rush of relief after three months of never seeing a person skulking in the woods.

Even the mercy of having no view of the pine tree falling seemed like a service the trail cams offered; all she had was a jolt to the ground triggering the video. No one could see everything, anticipate everything. She was getting better at reassuring herself.

The ritual of retrieving the SD media cards each morning, which took Sam to the far corners of the property, pleased her as well. To, perhaps, encounter a rabbit or a box turtle during that collection, while refilling the birdbaths that had become nocturnal raccoon playgrounds. To gather up the data and examine it over coffee and breakfast back inside, cocooned in the embrace of the canopy of oaks and magnolias over the house, seen from the high windows. To smell mixed with the strong coffee the faint pleasant scent of cedar from the ceiling’s wooden beams. To be quiet and still and have all thought be channeled into observing the lives of creatures that stirred only after Sam had gone to sleep.

It felt, over time, like not just a distraction but being part of something that as yet required nothing from her.

011.

Zanth Peters, though, was becoming a project. Sam didn’t know why exactly she’d started off thinking of Zanth that way, as a project rather than an impediment or just an asshole. But standing on the fallen tree trunk and remembering him in his cowboy hat with a demeanor like they’d encountered each other in rural Montana rankled her in an unusual way.

There had been one additional encounter, brief, a week after the first, where she’d caught him in his backyard and asked him to leave the fallen tree after all, because in reading up about easy things you could do to help wildlife, she’d discovered the dead wood was beneficial for woodpeckers and other creatures.

He’d looked at her like she was nuts but nodded—less work for him. She’d also said she would clean up the debris around the tree; she wanted more branch piles for the box turtles in the yard, so they had cover from the raccoons. But she had some idea in her head as well about clearing a safe passage for the animals on the trail cam.

So, good as her word, Sam walked down to the easement a few days after Zanth had had the tree cut down. She’d brought an electric-powered weed trimmer, holding branch loppers in her other gloved hand. She had a song by the Cranes pulsing in her head.

The song cut off when she reached the site.

Zanth had already clear-cut the area . . . brutally. He’d hacked down harmless grape vines and leveled valuable winged sumac with equal lack of regard. The camphor saplings she’d wanted to pull so they wouldn’t spread had been slashed back to ragged stubs that might self-repair or might die slowly. The native grasses that would have in time grown roots deep enough to hold the soil and prevent the sheets of rainwater from rushing down the steep slope of ridiculous lawn unimpeded into the already eroding dry creek bed . . . all of that had been torn up with special attention to detail, by hand.

Worse, Zanth had clearly sprayed herbicide over all of it when finished. If she didn’t know better, she’d have thought he was frantically trying to create a kind of poison moat at the edges of his property. She recognized the acrid smell and the limp, sickly yellow of the remaining vegetation and was suddenly glad she was wearing gloves, could put on a mask. Should she hope for rain today to dilute it, or drought to hold the active ingredient in place and contain the damage?

Sam noted details like how Zanth had maimed a water oak, for no reason, half cutting, half pulling and tearing down one fern-covered limb, and then left it there on the ground, come to rest in the dry creek bed. Perhaps not a mortal injury, but either a carelessness or intent that spoke to not knowing the value of what lay down in the ravine.

The state of mind concerned her. That’s what Sam decided, standing there for a long moment, considering the details. The brokenness of the scene, the way it read like the aftermath of violence. Undisguised. How it had all been left where it had fallen after being butchered, with no attempt to tidy up what had happened or make it consistent with the manicured grass just beyond the fence, the carefully weeded stone steps that led down to the little gate with its ridiculous threat.

A message? Like he thought he knew her soul, and what could damage it.

But he didn’t.

No, this was him on full display. This was who he was, and how she knew there might well be further incursions on her property.

010.

Soon after witnessing the damage Zanth had done, Sam received a call from her friend Monica around lunchtime, and the two talked as Sam sat on a bench in the front yard, hidden from the street by the wall of mature azalea bushes, surrounded by coneflowers and hydrangeas. They hadn’t seen each other in two years and “talked” mostly through text messages.

Sam almost told Monica about her clashes with Zanth in an ironic, outlandish way, as a jokey anecdote, but realized it couldn’t be shaped that way. Instead, Sam would sound like a stranger, not the sarcastic, hard-charging person Monica remembered. She crushed her lemon slice into her iced tea and wondered if it was like that: the fresh bitterness that faded into nothing but a taste.

Anyway, Monica was doing most of the talking for her—they hadn’t caught up in many months. Monica knew about the move and Sam’s separation from her husband, but Sam had withheld some of the gory details, and avoided the incident, and it was clear from their conversation that Monica hadn’t read about it in the news. To Monica, it was just a sad, banal tale of increasing alienation and Tim spending more time at a separate gym.

“And do you think you’ll stay there long?” Monica asked.

“I don’t know yet.”

“Do you like it?”

“It’s swell.”

Monica laughed. “Swell and spiffy.”

Code words for veterans of the college bar scene and one drunk encounter. For a moment, Sam wondered if their secret language would allow her to deliver her ravine experience via a kind of shorthand, in time. “It’s hotter here and I’m drinking more.”

“Like the old days.”

“Except soon I’ll be getting old.”

“And is there evidence?”

“Evidence?”

“Like, more about your dad. In the house?”

“No. Sadly. Goodly. Indifferently.”

Monica laughed. “All the things at once, right? I get it.”

But did she get it? Sam could sense the distance between them—between her phone and Monica’s phone—as an outward-rushing thing, pushing her into memory.

Sam couldn’t carry a tune, as her father had said with a smirk. Her father had been mostly smirk and cliché—as armor, as reflex, as something to counterbalance the sadness in his eyes she didn’t believe he’d earned. Like knowing how to sneak into places without being caught or how to safely handle a gun. She did not know where her father was buried; he’d wandered so much since leaving the house.

Once, she had loved Monica like a sister, which meant it was complicated, and now it felt . . . too simple.

Monica had continued talking, about her life in the big city, about her new, serious boyfriend, about how her real estate career was on the uptick. Everybody wanted to buy and apartment prices had skyrocketed. It was ridiculous and amazing and scary sometimes.

While Sam stared into the limitless green all around her, the way it cocooned her, the way it seduced her, wanted her to be part of it.

Then there was nothing, nothing at all to say, and Monica was confused by Sam’s silence. But the onrush of words had begun to make Sam feel weightless or meaningless, or like Monica had inflicted something on her. But to say that felt cruel, irrational, uncalled for.

“Okay, I’m out. It’s not you, it’s me. I can’t take this much socializing anymore,” Sam said.

“What else can you do on a phone conversation but talk?” Monica said, hurt.

Later, Sam would apologize by text, try to explain, but her thoughts had already turned back to the trail cams.

009.

So much surprised her about the trail-cam footage. For example, the crispness of an armadillo in the trail cam’s black and white came as a kind of revelation until she realized it was silver. The white in black-and-white night footage was really silver, and the silver delivered the detail of an armadillo’s hinged exoskeleton as if composed of cascading curves of some metal worked by elves into armor. This transformed the plonky fidget of their daytimeness into more of a noble quest of digging and snorting. And also in the shadow and silver, the trouble of their ears, both afterthought and suggestion of a Muppet, became delicate trumpets—a marvel of counterpoint to their thick-clad bodies and resolute snouts. She could appreciate the court jester, but she loved that there was also the knight.

The gray fox delighted her the most in those first moments of the clip, with a canter almost like a horse and a jaunty manner. Then the change to a trot on spying the trail cam, and the lowered head as the fox came down the ridge to smell the plastic case. It stood there on the screen, looking almost like a friendly dog, nose sniff-sniff-sniffing.

What did the fox receive from that transaction, from the scent? Did the fox see from the smells the careful process of loading the batteries, of her rough hands lashing the strap around the tree, tying it tight, flicking the switch that brought plastic and wires to life?

Then the screen was just the fox’s face, up close, and everything closed down into those features. The fox’s unguarded expression, the openness there, came as a kind of shock, an unexpected weight.

She felt such affection for the fox, she printed out the image and put a cheap frame around it to mount on her office wall. In that first moment after the wire lay across the nail, the photo felt like a trophy, but Sam knew that wasn’t true. The fox was out there, free, and of itself, and to itself, by its own self, regarded. To be free like that—was it possible? Nothing she did with the photo mattered to the fox, and that was a comfort.

Sometimes, though, when Sam stared at the photo of the fox, she wondered if there might be a photo of her still, on the wall in her ex-husband’s house, or, at least, in a drawer somewhere.

The moment after the moment she had immortalized, the fox had become cautious, uncertain, staring off into a distance the trail cam could never hope to capture.

008.

Sam found she liked having Geraldine over to help garden, despite the interrogations, and so one morning they were enthusiastically pulling up English ivy and some crosshatching “low grower,” as Geraldine put it, that had become so ubiquitous as to lack a proper name. The heat and humidity assaulted them as always, but Sam had grown used to it. Besides, the Stokes’ asters, arrayed in a defensive circle against the invaders, needed their help.

Geraldine, in succor for back pain, had brought a nifty stool that looked like a huge golf tee, while Sam labored on her knees. She liked the feel of the grass against her legs, the sense of being enclosed by the greenery. She knew from her rewilding books that it released endorphins in the brain, to put your hands in the dirt.

“Did you know the people who lived here after my father?” she asked Geraldine as they worked, tossing weeds onto a growing pile over at the curb. It was a question that Sam had lost among other questions she’d meant to ask but came back to like a thready pulse.

“No. All those renters, every single one—they kept to themselves. Then they were just gone.”

“That’s odd.”

Geraldine shrugged from her golf-tee throne. “Not really. Transients. Got overwhelmed probably. It’s a lot to maintain, with an absent landlord. Not everyone likes living this close to wildlife.”

Sam could see the logic in that, even though she thought Geraldine was holding something back. How would she feel about her beautiful walkways and upper and lower decks in three or four years when she was replacing rotted wood right and left? And imagine if she were only renting the place.

“Trouble,” Geraldine said, clipped, and stood.

Zanth Peters appeared without preamble above Sam, where she crouched on the grass. She wanted to leap up and get out from under his shadow, but that felt like weakness.

“Go home, Zanth,” Geraldine said, but the stern look on her face seemed to delight Zanth.

Sam stood awkwardly, trowel in hand; her left leg had fallen asleep beneath her. Ridiculous, to feel threatened right there, in daylight, a couple of neighbors out in their yards. But Geraldine’s rigid posture felt prophetic.

“Fine day for a walk,” Zanth said, despite the sun being cantilevered into his face, his broad hat no help.

“Is it?” Sam asked. No sidewalk connected Sam’s semicircle to Zanth’s street across the ravine, so he must have spent some effort . . . unless, an alarming thought, he’d snuck over the fence and across the ravine onto their semicircle.

“Any day you’re alive is a good day for a walk,” Zanth said, with a faux cheeriness. In the sunlight she noticed how gaunt Zanth’s face was, his features experiencing a kind of . . . disarray . . . not echoed by his stance.

“What do you want?” Sam asked.

“Zanth probably just wants to tell you all the things you need to kill on your property,” Geraldine said. “Zanth’ll tell you armadillos have fangs if it suits his purpose. He’ll misunderstand any critter if he can do some damage.”

“It’s true armadillos are dangerous.”

“Just like trees are dangerous. Like burrows. Like garden sheds. Every damn thing.”

Sam felt like she’d stepped into the middle of a conversation continued from the past, taken up at a point where she could almost follow it. How long had Geraldine known him?

Zanth gave that shit-eating smile he just couldn’t help.

“Geraldine, I—”

“Don’t talk to me,” Geraldine said, perversely.

“Am not doing so,” Zanth said, and turned to Sam. It was hard not to see the skull behind his face. “Thought more about turning on your backyard lights at night?”

“I like being able to see the stars,” she said.

“I do like the stars, but I feel it prudent to keep the lights on,” Zanth said, as if he hadn’t understood the cause and effect.

“That’s nice for you. I was going to ask if you’d turn yours off or get them shielded so they don’t shine across the ravine.”

“Even the renters left them on. All the time. Even during the day.”

“Good for them.” With all the herbicide and pesticide in the toolshed, she could tell at least some of the renters had belonged to the same religion as Zanth.

Geraldine had crossed her arms, glowering, but Zanth ignored her. He was probably used to it by now. “Wildlife and such down there that you should discourage.”

“‘And such’?”

“Turn of phrase. Turn of phrase.”

But Sam didn’t think so. She didn’t think it was a turn of phrase. She felt she was seeing the edge of some weird obsession where Zanth both loathed and loved the ravine. Something complicated, difficult to untangle.

“No one comes up out of the ravine,” Sam said. “I’ve seen nothing strange . . . except you.”

Zanth looked at her a second as if he meant to take that up with her.

Instead, he said, “You just leave your lights on, if you know what’s good for this neighborhood. That’s all I have to say. Since I was walking by anyway.”

He turned on his heel with the precision of a soldier in a military parade and in a few long strides was already almost past Geraldine’s house, headed back to the main road.

Sam thought of what she’d read about the insect apocalypse, of her unspoken pledge not to kill a single living thing in her new home, how she would never kill anything ever again, and the space between her and Zanth grew exponentially until he was just a slender form turning a corner into the stormwater ditch, headed home.

Had there been some pleading in Zanth’s voice? That’s what she couldn’t decide. Alongside the anger?

“Certain times of year I turn my lights on,” Geraldine said, “but he’s just a bitter old fool.” Direct as always, but an odd whiff of an excuse in there, too. “Still, you could turn on your lights at night. Especially this season.”

“What for?” Sam asked. Were there certain times of year Zanth went roving, and not others?

But Geraldine didn’t reply.

007.

Zanth receded from Sam for a time; her work intensified and she had weeding in the yard. Geraldine still came over, but not as much. A pattern, or rhythm, to life in the house imposed itself nonetheless, because of work. The ravine faded into the backdrop as Sam focused on her clients. Then: a problem, an issue that she should’ve been able to put aside but couldn’t.

In the early summer, as the elderberry bushes bloomed with intricate white flowers and the swamp sunflower she had planted began to show their strength and tower over her . . . as the rains came now near constant in the midafternoon, the humidity near 100 percent . . . the trail cams died, one by one.

They winked out in ways that at first Sam put down to heat and humidity and the constant rain leaking in at the seams. By the time the third had died, she lay awake that night, unable to sleep, knowing she had only one left, out there in the wilderness.

Sure enough, in the morning, the SD card revealed that the trail cam, while having new batteries, had taken no footage, and checking the screen revealed it had been snuffed out like the rest, despite no obvious damage.

The last footage from the trail cam, from a few nights before, puzzled her, in part for its banality: a snuffling opossum with an ordinary waddle over to the birdbath for a long drink. This clip was followed by just a photo of the moonlit birdbath, ripples across the water’s surface as if something had just left. Very normal—the trail cams often caught the aftermath of some fast-moving animal.

But the surrounding light . . . the light felt like a premonition of disaster. The entire scene had been bathed, for just a few seconds, in an extreme light, washing out the optics and then, inevitably, three or four shots of darkness so total nothing could be discerned within it. Was it Zanth, lurking? Or just Zanth or someone else across the ravine turning on their backyard lights and overwhelming the trail cam? Neither explanation satisfied her.

Here, the trail cam died, and no amount of fiddling with it at the dining room table could repair it. No stills or video footage showed up on any of the SD cards thereafter; they remained as blank as if all the animals had suddenly left the ravine.

As her efforts accumulated in their uselessness, her inability to fix the trail cams began to feel like a personal failure, almost a moral lapse. She knew that made no sense, but the emotion behind it began to overtake her in a way that she found dangerous. So she focused on reviewing the footage and stills over and over again. Which took the edge off. Another alone thing. Tim would’ve had no patience for her attention to detail, or even to the purpose of the trail cams. The more she thought about it, maybe in the end the fundamental split had been outside/inside with him, and while she could be inside, he couldn’t hack the outside.

That made Sam laugh, thinking that maybe if they’d just always lived in thresholds, doorways, the antechambers, they could’ve made it. Despite her sin. Despite his doubt.

Take another swig of wine, get off the thought and back to the task.

Looking at the trail-cam instructions, she found an admission of guilt: that prolonged water exposure or exposure to “foreign elements” could damage the camera.

Green residue of water seepage stained the battery compartment. A tiny foam occupied one corner of the inner carapace, as of a spider or other miniature invader. This seemed insignificant, but the smell of the trail cam drove her to investigate further. Somehow, the trail cam held a faint hint of . . . freshness? Like when she bit into a mandarin orange slice or mint or . . . because she couldn’t track it down, the comparisons created were all wrong.

Did perfume makers think in these terms? Maybe, but not about the funk rising from trail cams that had been out in the sun and rain too long. Sam was sure of that, if nothing else.

Under the regard of a magnifying glass, Sam saw more clearly the substance on one of the trail cam clasps. Algae or some kind of pollen, perhaps. Much of it had fallen away from her rough handling of the cam as she’d brought it up out of the ravine. What remained had a sense of tracery to it, almost as of something made of lace. A raccoon could probably make a mark like that, although she’d always thought of the pads of a raccoon’s hands as rougher, their approach to life unlikely to be this delicate.

Then the pattern fell away from her again, and once again she thrust the trail cam from her, disgusted. No pattern, to anything, other than what she kept trying to impose.

006.

All the useless trash you could find about someone online. If you were bored. If you were curious. If your trail cams had all kicked the bucket suddenly . . .

Zanth Peters had been involved in real estate for over a decade, as a partner in a company called Ravine Community Estates. That raised Sam’s eyebrows for reasons she couldn’t quite explain, both banal and outlandish.

When the company went bankrupt, Zanth started working for a car insurance company, became a manager there, and had retired five years ago. He was older than Sam had thought—sixty-seven. He’d carried a lot of debt for a long time, if the triple mortgage on his house was any indication. Fallout from the real estate problem?

She didn’t know if only three criminal charges for a man with Zanth’s temper felt low or just showed he was mostly bluff. The DUI dated from twenty-five years ago, but the two trespassing charges were from the past decade. She had a sense they involved neighbors along the ravine, but the details were oddly vague. He’d gotten fines, community service, and probation for both.

A little more digging, and she’d discovered one of the trespassing charges had been filed by a former renter of her father’s house. A couple of newspaper articles mentioned Zanth as “drunk and disorderly,” but no charges had resulted.

She almost didn’t realize her left hand had closed into a fist. All Sam wanted was to tend to her garden and to forget about that fateful morning . . . but, over time, would this fucker let her?

The phone ringing jangled her nerves, but it was just Monica again; she didn’t take the call, texted, Busy being nosy and provocative and risky—will call when I’m sensible again.

Sam couldn’t stop looking down into the ravine as dusk came on, wondering if the next time she saw someone down there it would be Zanth.

Nor could she stop thinking about something she had just learned online, which was the fact that Zanth Peters’s ex-wife’s name had been Geraldine.

005.

When she’d exhausted sources of information on Zanth, Sam returned to the video clips. She had a lull in her job and no longer felt like working in the garden the way she had before, because that was something she had done with Geraldine. She wasn’t sure she wanted to see Geraldine for a while, or, at least, she wanted to think of a way to ask Geraldine about Zanth and lies of omission.

Each video clip ran ten seconds long, and Sam’s next step was to review all the clips from all four trail cams, going back a month before the lack of footage. Had there been some inciting event for the decline of the trail cams not covered by the manual? Some sort of unnatural radiation or contamination? Mostly, she felt she hadn’t looked closely enough, been concerned only with the animals in the foreground.

At first, nothing appeared unusual, out of place. Yet, especially in those last nights when the trail cams began to fail, and she was charting their dissolution, she began to notice a graininess creep in that could not be explained as operational error or heat, humidity, or rain. Could it be, too, that the stance of the raccoons took on some new urgency, some new dimension? The way they now, in that recent past now receding, stood upright in the birdbaths, food forgotten, staring almost mesmerized out into the night, bodies slowly turning as if wanting to keep some perceived threat in view. A threat that always stayed beyond the trail cams’ range.

But only when she turned to scrutiny of the still shots did Sam find something she couldn’t explain, and it brought her back to Zanth.

Because when she blew up the frame of one placed near the western edge of her property, Sam discovered the image of a trail cam buried in the lower left edge.

Not one of her trail cams. Someone else’s.

Pointed directly at her property.

004.

Avaunt, memory, and time, which sped up and slowed down and became hard to capture or hold on to now. A stretched feeling again, like she didn’t have enough of her self to hold on to.

Avaunt, a term Tim had loved and used often, as in “Avaunt, and let’s get up off the couch and go to a bar.” “Avaunt, let’s move on from this uncomfortable topic.” “Avaunt, I’m gone in the wind, nothing needed from you, but something has to change.” The value of always having kept their finances separate had never been so terribly etched in expediency, nor had the fact that she’d always made more money than Tim.

Because of the thing she’d done, that terrible thing she’d done . . . which hadn’t been hard or difficult or slow or sudden or calculated or by chance or bad luck or a plot or fate or . . . after running down into the ravine to retrieve the evidence, now on the table in front of her, she’d had a couple of glasses of strong red wine and fallen into the widening gyre, in a chair, on the upper deck, halfway up the tree line, in the canopy, as easily eye to eye with a barred owl or red-tailed hawk.

Obsessed by that pivotal moment, even though she had existed within it and continued to exist within it, because it was also a series of events that had, in fact, been typed up by a police officer as fact or facts, read back to her, signed by her. Her statement or her confession, whichever you preferred to call it, and she preferred to call it nothing.

But, also, as the overlay, of justification of willful daydreams of how it might have been or not been. Details she didn’t know were real, accurate, or later overlaid. The way they always said eyewitnesses’ accounts should be treated with suspicion, that the brain reconstructed what it couldn’t remember—in other words, the brain lied. To itself and others. You couldn’t trust a brain any more than you could trust a soul. And if that were the case, in this maelstrom of might-have-beens, how could Sam be sure of anything about that moment? Like the surety that it had been an accident, or that if she had the moment to do over, she would have done something different, or done nothing at all.

A squirrel surprised her by jumping from a tree branch onto the deck railing to her left. The squirrel froze there, cautious of her, perhaps even terrified. But then, as if making a calculation, the squirrel ran across the deck right in front of her, leaped to the far railing, and from there onto the tree on that side.

Sam cheered in the aftermath, raising her wineglass—toasting the squirrel’s bravery and, perhaps, complimenting herself on how nature had become accustomed to her presence.

But then, later, as dusk came on and she was putting a cork in a paltry eighth of a bottle of red, she paused and reconsidered. She had gotten it dead wrong. The squirrel wasn’t used to her. The squirrel had been fleeing some threat and had been so afraid of whatever lay behind it that it had overcome fear of her to scurry across the deck.

Something about that idea made the hairs rise on her arms. The air felt hotter, thicker, than minutes before. Her mouth was dry. Slowly, she looked over the side, to the ground and the little birdbath below, surrounded by elderberry bushes. There were no squirrels, no sign of predator, of threat. Just a silence, perhaps one she brought with her.

What lay in front of her was a battered trail cam, no SD card, wireless transmission. She had a pretty good idea of who had put it there.

The blessing that Zanth didn’t know what she had been capable of. The curse or irony or blessing that Sam wasn’t capable of it anymore.

003.

Zanth had no dog, and had no security cameras in the back, which struck her as odd given how territorial he behaved, even as she saw the sliding glass doors at the end of a little stone path as an obvious trap. She wondered if he was the kind of person who liked to lure in a thief.

Sam crept up, using the shadows of bushes as cover from the bright LED lights, but they didn’t much bother her. People thought lights deterred criminals, but unless someone was watching, lights only made it easier to navigate unfamiliar terrain. Especially as she had the floor plan of his house memorized.

Yet, not on her schematic: the fact that, weirdly, Zanth had dug ditches on the ridge in front of the sliding glass doors, so the stone path became a series of three blunt planks over them. She stopped for longer than she’d planned to consider those ditches, so odd did she find them. It had never occurred to her, from her vantage looking up the steep slope confronting Zanth the first time, that this . . . fortification . . . would exist here.

The ditches, or trenches, were full of broken glass and cut-up barbed-wire fence at the bottom, in careful layers of harm. This struck her as both sick and delusional. A child might get hurt stumbling into one, but otherwise it was like a moat in the era of modern warfare.

Slim and small as she was, Sam searched for a window to climb through and found one that appeared to lead into a darkened office. She softly pried it open so she could attack the hinges, and braced herself to run if an alarm went off.

But it didn’t. One thing about Zanth being dead broke: it was unlikely he could afford a sophisticated security system.

After that, not a second thought—she slid through like some animal born to the task and did a kind of handstand on the desk jammed up against the window and wall, so she could quietly bring her legs over the threshold, then into the office chair, like a slow-motion somersault.

The L of the desk was busy with papers and the floor cluttered with stacks of books, so she had to find her footing with care. She cast around her with a tiny shielded flashlight, a narrow beam that couldn’t be seen from another room.

The shadowed desk clutter seemed so severe, she couldn’t at first tell what she was looking at. Just incomprehensible diagrams and more books, file folders with papers spilling out, dust thick on documents that hadn’t been moved in years. An old desktop computer in the corner of the L desk had a laptop shoved in front of it. A mountain of ancient floppy disks, too, which explained keeping the desktop computer. The moldering smell of it all, both dry and humid at the same time, made her nose wrinkle, stifle a sneeze.

She pivoted amongst Zanth’s wreckage to take in the rest of the room. The walls had been papered with more schematics and framed memorabilia from his real estate days, in such bewildering profusion it all ran together. Finally, her gaze came to rest on a map that stood out from the rest. It showed the ravine, but drawn around the edges was dense housing nothing like the actual suburban half-acre lots. Just the wide trough of woods and compact housing with a footprint remarkably like a scaled-back version of her house . . . Ravine Community Estates? Did Zanth feel possessive of the ravine because of the control he’d lost over it?

The shock residing in the map was mild, but shock nonetheless. The clutter brought on a creeping claustrophobia, and she meant to escape it not by escaping, but by exploring the corridor and rooms beyond. Yet when she reached the open door of the office, that goal became impossible. The hallway was stacked high with more books and huge piles of newspapers, along with clear plastic barrels of water and stacks of canned food. The musty smell became sharper here, as if mixed with stale or rotting food.

Zanth was a hoarder and maybe an end-of-the-world survivalist, and it might take forensic anthropologists and archaeologists and a team of psychologists a decade sorting through the raw thickness of that to get a handle on how Zanth had ended up here and not somewhere else even more claustrophobic.

Get out, it all screamed at her. Get out and don’t come back.

A physical danger rose irrational from the junk in the hallway, the harm reaching out to Sam in a way she hadn’t felt in a long time. She almost panicked from the feeling, but managed to turn slow, half expecting to see Zanth leering in at her from the open window.

All was still and quiet except for the ever-present song of happy insects, and the distant, confused burble of a barred owl.

It was nothing and took no time to climb onto the desk and brace for a farewell back into the night. But the light of her flashlight had fallen on the area next to the laptop and the two small cups there. One held paperclips, but the other held SD cards—the same type she used.

Her pulse beat raw in her ears, her throat, as she stared at that bowlful of cards. Right on top was one she’d marked with a ballpoint pen to make sure she put it back in the same trail cam, to preserve a monthlong chain of evidence. She’d thought rain had washed it away, but no: miraculously, that exact same mark existed on this SD card in Zanth’s office.

Zanth had been taking the cards, replacing them with faulty ones. So she wouldn’t know what he was doing down in the ravine.

002.

Noon of the next day, a call came in to the landline.

When she picked up, the connection crackled with interference. She said nothing, just waited.

“Hello. Sam? Is that you? Are you there?” A man’s voice, half-familiar?

Still, she said nothing.

“It’s Tim.”

The dread, acknowledged, that she’d carried as expectation, imagining this moment. His voice still came through unclear, as if he was somewhere far distant or otherworldly. Could she still sense judgment in the tone? Did it even matter at this point?

“How did you find me?” As if it mattered, now that he’d found her. What was this guilt welling up? Yes, she’d abandoned him, had just left and not told him where she was going. Yes, she’d imposed the separation on him. But he’d done it first, in all but name, by being absent even as his body walked around the house under remote control.

“Does it matter?” Reading her mind.

“What do you want?”

A hesitation, a calculation? “An explanation. Don’t you owe me that?”

“No amount of talking about it is going to help anything now.”

“Might help me.”

“Do you have something to tell me?” Sam asked. “Is that really why you called?” Something to confess, to offer up a kind of absolution.

The crackling reared up and seared the line.

“Where are you calling from? Call me back or I can call you.”

“No. You won’t call. You won’t call. You won’t even miss me.”

Sam held the phone away from her like it was some unrecognizable object she’d unearthed from the ravine.

When she placed the phone back to her ear, she said, “You’re not Tim.” The neediness, the wording. None of it matched up.

“No, no, I’m not Tim.” The crackling had disappeared, artificially induced, but a cackling had replaced it. “I just wanted to call and say: stay the hell off my property and out of my house.”

She smashed the phone down so hard she broke the cradle.

Ten minutes later she was banging on Geraldine’s front door, making the corny woodcut of a cartoon bluebird rattle on its nail. But there was no answer. Irrational, or maybe all too rational, she wasn’t thinking clearly . . . but, somehow, she held Geraldine responsible. For how it felt like Zanth pretending to be Tim had taken away a chance at reconciling, like the emotion she’d put into that moment could not be retrieved, that now, if Tim did call, she’d hear the echo of Zanth’s voice and would not get past that.

She wanted to hear that Geraldine had figured out who Sam was and betrayed her, not just that Zanth had done super sleuthing on the internet. That Geraldine had been the one who, ultimately, had ruined things.

She twisted around and leaned with her back against Geraldine’s door, looking out at the neighbor’s lawn across the street, with pink flamingo yard ornaments and a sign supporting the local police union. Non-ravine dwellers might as well have lived a hundred miles away, for all they knew.

What had given away her presence in Zanth’s house anyway? It must have been some disturbance in the dust, some homegrown security system she hadn’t recognized, like tape against the window jamb, and he’d made the leap to know it was her.

Nothing. No one. It looked dark inside. If Geraldine was hiding from her, she was doing a good job. Even angry, Sam recognized that following the rows of thick bushes around the side of the house and knocking on Geraldine’s back door was a bad, bad idea.

Frustrated, she lingered, exasperated, on the front step, wondering if Geraldine had gone to visit the pink flamingo neighbor.

Then came the disembodied voice, from behind the door.

“What do you want?”

That just made Sam angrier. “What do you think?”

“So he’s my ex.”

“You didn’t think that was important?”

“Not to you. I hate him.”

“He’s been watching me with cameras—on my own property.”

“Does that with everybody.”

“So that makes it okay?”

“You shot somebody. Is that okay?”

“Fuck you.”

It just came out. Sam had no control, or control didn’t find her worthy. She wished for the gun, even empty, recoiled from the thought, couldn’t stop imagining the weight in her hand.

Geraldine had said something, finally, and Sam hadn’t caught it, leaning up against the front door.

“It doesn’t matter, Geraldine,” Sam said. “I hardly know you.”

The fact was, the fact she couldn’t escape . . . the intruder had been about to turn and run. Sam had felt it even as she took aim at the figure. That if she’d only waited another second or two, what seemed like a threat, and Tim late from work, this would have become just so apparent. That confrontation would have devolved into escape. Something about the set of the shoulders that Sam had only registered later.

The intruder had been terrified, and Sam had let that fear register as guilt or intent, and then it was too late—there was just the recoil of the revolver in her hand and a crumpled form in the front yard.

How, when she cautiously came close and saw it was a woman, that, in the shadows, the similarities of her build, hair, face, meant Sam felt as if she had killed herself. That she was standing over her own body.

“You be safe—turn on your lights,” Geraldine said as Sam walked away, but it came out muffled and hollow and took a long time for Sam to understand.

Safe. Turn on your lights. She thought she’d been safe with Tim, but that was when she’d found out he’d been judging her all along, when maybe she should’ve been judging him.

The police had ruled it self-defense, the right of property owners.

But Tim hadn’t.

Tim only saw that Sam had shot one of his college students. One he’d been fond of, and if he blamed Sam, he also wouldn’t admit what Sam suspected but could never prove.

About why the student had been walking up to their house in the first place. Why she’d been acting furtive and suspicious. Why someone might think she was an intruder.

001.

The pacing, the back-and-forth, the way she couldn’t get out of her head. She tried calling Monica, but she didn’t answer. She found Zanth’s number online, called that. No answer, and no idea what she would have shouted at him anyway.

Then it was past the time for action, and she experienced a pulse-pounding fatigue, decided if she could only sleep, maybe it would all become clear in the morning. Maybe she would awaken delivered of all this rage, this sense of the unfair randomness of life.

She turned off the living room lights one by one, but when the house was dark and she was about to draw the blinds . . . a light still flickered in her peripheral vision, down in the ravine. She stood stock still and as sober as she could be after three glasses of wine, swaying a little. It was so simple, what she should do: finish closing the blinds and go to bed.

Instead, Sam watched as the flicker became a golden glow, waxed and waned as it traveled through thinner and thicker tree cover. It wasn’t like a yard light that shone out bright in all directions. It wasn’t a flashlight. That it could be candlelight conjured up a wayward image of a tiny, wizened man in an old-fashioned nightgown shuffling his way through the stickery underbrush of the ravine, holding a candle out ahead to see.

But she knew who it really was: Zanth.

He was down there now, and headed onto her property. Invading her space with his sick phone call and now invading for real. She found this intolerable. She found it intolerable, but also the idea of calling the police intolerable and intolerably slow, and it was also intolerable that he was going to get away with this infringement, and the isolation was intolerable, and thinking about his cramped, pathetic house was intolerable, and, in the end, doing nothing was the worst intolerable of all.

She shoved shoes on her feet, grabbed the empty gun out of the kitchen drawer, had a second of “Are you really going to do this?,” and then that was washed away by her anger and her sadness, and in the next moment she was already down at one of the two little bridges over the creek bed, seeking the light, aware that there wasn’t a sound in the ravine—not a happy insect or a far-distant, rustling opossum, and no wind, as if a sail had wrapped itself tight around a mast and taken all the air out of that place.

The gun had a weight heavier than she remembered and her wrist ached from holding it and her palm against the metal burned, and what if she could walk through the darkness and back into the moment when she’d made that decision, what if she could find herself there again, and do something different?

But it would always be too late for that.

000.

A hint of the light, she thought, minutes later, on the easement, and she’d gotten turned around as the moon had lost itself behind clouds. She had every right to walk the easement, creeping quiet. She’d catch Zanth out and give him a scare, so he’d leave her alone. He’d realize she was too much for him, too difficult to deal with, and she’d finally be left alone. She wouldn’t hurt anyone ever again, but she didn’t mind making a bastard shit his pants.

The light continued twitching in and out with bewildering inconsistency, and she noticed, too, that Zanth’s backyard lights were off—another clue that he was down in the ravine.

The fence line struck Sam as the best way to stay oriented in the shadows, but the dry creek bed provided the best cover, so she kept her eye on the soft, muffled glint of the chain link, accentuated when the moon came clear for a few seconds at a time. Padding down the moss-lined creek bed.

It felt preternaturally long and silent, that passage, as if traveling into the past or into some location more primordial, where the shadows all fed into each other and couldn’t be pinned down, but kept moving the way the clouds above moved and changed intensity depending on the moon.

The light had disappeared but had last been near an oak with a double trunk, which had improbably survived the fall of the pine tree. She marked that position as she crept forward. Now the humidity was a sheen on her skin, and in the silence the humidity spoke of decay and contamination and all sorts of rambling things that distracted her, and neither could any mosquito deny itself such a fine meal, but onward she went.

She had almost reached the double-trunked oak when Sam heard a low, shallow sound of breathing, and glancing toward the fence line, she saw a tall figure sagging into the chain-link mesh.

He had seen her and was uncertain or afraid. Good.

She emerged up out of the creek bed, around a huge cut-up log from the downed pine tree. He must have seen her clearly by then, but he still just stood there, breathing shallow.

She turned on her tiny flashlight and shone it briefly on her face, then back at the ground, so there could be no mistake.

“Sneaking around at night again, Zanth? Stealing my trail-cam cards, harassing me with phone calls. Can’t mind your own business, can you?” Never mind that she’d broken into his house; that now seemed like a reasonable action, given his transgressions.

She was ten feet away and couldn’t see his face, then five, and still Zanth lay in canopy shadow, not responding.

A flicker of alarm that came from somewhere else, somewhere underneath the armor of her resolve.

“I’ve got a gun on you, Zanth, just so you know, and I think you need to say something now.”

But Zanth said nothing, and so she shone her flashlight right on his face.

She went cold, so cold it felt like a feeling that had come up from the ground to strike her, to pull all the warmth from her and leave her with nothing.

Because Zanth’s eyes were open wide and blood vessels had burst there and his mouth was wide, too, and formed a soundless scream that was never ending and never beginning and had always been there, and his hands at his sides were so tight in fists, as she stumbled a step away from him and the flashlight wavered.

And when the light, the golden pine-dust glow, rose up behind Sam in that dark place, drowning out her flashlight, and suffused Zanth’s face with brightness beyond measure, an illumination that could not be fixed on any map or by any measure, Sam knew that she had misjudged . . . everything.

Not just Zanth’s intent, but the trail cams, the staring racoons, Geraldine’s curtness. How could she not have seen the outlines of this answer to the mystery? Because it was improbable? Because she lacked imagination? Because her guilt and anger had obscured the rest of the world?

She sensed an immense weight at her back, to go with the light, and the scent of mint and orange she remembered from the trail cam. That delicate filigree she had attributed to the raccoons, expressed now with a force beyond measure. Was this why he’d given the house to her, or had he never experienced this surge, this new-old thing, this absolute lack of knowing that did not ever want to know?

Geraldine had said to turn on the lights in this season. Sam hadn’t heeded that, and now she knew she would never turn around to face what it might be or had once been. She would rather stare into Zanth’s face instead and never, ever turn around, in this lifetime or the next.

She dropped the gun, and let go of time, of control, of everything, and that was all right, in the end, and maybe even a kind of strange blessing. Because now she knew that everything since the shooting wasn’t a dream or purgatory or a special kind of hell. It was real. This was real. She wasn’t dead and still walking.

She was alive. She was alive.

As the light regarded her, and even after it had moved on, no longer curious, and left her trembling and fallen to her knees.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Photo © Kyle Cassidy

Jeff VanderMeer is the New York Times bestselling author of Hummingbird Salamander and the Southern Reach trilogy. He is the recipient of the Nebula Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and three World Fantasy Awards. Jeff’s work has also appeared in the New York Times, Vulture, and Esquire.com, among others.