True Places(59)

In the two months since Suzanne had carried Iris out of the woods, Iris had changed her mind about many things. Not everything her parents had led her to believe was true, not completely. She admitted she liked having enough to eat every day and appreciated the luxury of indoor plumbing, especially hot running water. She liked clean clothing and a warm bed, and felt guilty about it. In her head, the voices of her parents were becoming quieter, muted by the new reality in which Iris found herself. Honestly, she couldn’t see what was so wrong with it. Maybe being soft wasn’t bad by itself—conveniences weren’t evil—but only because the price of those conveniences was invisible, or hidden, or just not that interesting to most people.

Much of what Iris saw around her—the houses, the cars, the clothes, the thousands of kinds of foods in the supermarket—went far beyond basic convenience and comfort and left her bewildered. She wanted to know how it was justified, how the price exacted on the natural world was reckoned against the extra comfort gained, but didn’t know how to ask. And if she did, as she had just done with Whit, she didn’t seem to get anywhere. The deeper she explored the new world into which she had been plunged, the more she felt her parents were right and the more she wished she could retreat into the woods and never emerge again, even if it meant no more hot showers.

“Breaking ground,” Whit had called it, with pride in his voice. He was proud and he was eager, but in his eagerness Iris thought he was skipping over a lot. She’d heard him talk to Suzanne about money, and his voice had an insistent quality when he did, like the buzzing of a bee deep inside a flower, gloating in the abundance. How much money Whit required was something Iris could not even guess at. She might ask him one day, when she understood more, if she was around.

Iris lifted her eyes from the shin-high grass around her to the tall trees beyond, now in full leaf, shimmering in the breeze. The tulip trees were covered with yellow and orange blossoms the size of teacups held open to the sky. Birds darted from branch to branch, eager in their preparations for new life. The air smelled tangy and Iris felt the urge to run. The muscles in her legs were bound tight with unused energy, but she knew if she took off, Whit would follow her. Suzanne would find out and be upset again. It might be worth it. Whit and Suzanne’s lack of understanding of her was not her fault. In those woods she might find a moment of freedom, a small quiet space away from the terrible calculations of what people would destroy for something that, as far as she could tell, did not necessarily make them happier. In those woods she might breathe easily and deeply, and remember who she was.

In those woods she might find Ash.

Whit interrupted her thoughts. “Iris, if you could, would you really go back into the woods? Would you really do that?” He had read her mind. Or maybe it was a question he’d been carrying for a while.

She looked at him out of the corner of her eye. The wind had ruffled his hair and the sun had brought color to his cheeks. He had a friendly, pleasant way about him when he stopped pushing so hard. Iris felt sorry for him then, for everything he believed he needed to chase from here to there, as if the world were laid out before him flat, with a finish line at the end and prizes for the first to cross it. Whit didn’t seem that soft to her. He was stretched out thin and brittle. He and Suzanne both.

“Yes, I would go back. But what I guess I’d like to know is, why wouldn’t you?”

He smiled. “I don’t think I’d last very long.”

“You wouldn’t have to be alone. You could have help, other people. I did, for most of the time.”

Whit studied her a moment, then pointed behind them to the old house where they’d left the car. “We should get going.”

They cut across the field, the breeze now at their backs. A pair of meadowlarks swooped past, dipping into the grass and out again with stuttering wing beats.

By summer this ground would be broken, and Whit would have more money.

What would happen to her?

That night Iris couldn’t sleep. She tried to empty her mind, but images and sensations kept pushing back in: Brynn sprawled on the bed in her underwear, the silkiness of the fur coat, Suzanne’s face, horrified and impossibly sad, Brynn’s touch and her promises, Whit’s grasping for money, for more and more, the innocent land marked for destruction. Iris’s room was quiet, but her thoughts roiled like the bottom of a waterfall.

Soft air, more summer than spring, floated in through the open window. The moon was already high, casting blue shadows that made the familiar objects in the room take on wondrous qualities. She shouldn’t go out, she knew she shouldn’t, but she couldn’t stay. She would come back—at least she planned to—but tonight she had to break out into the moonlight.

She climbed out of bed and dressed in yesterday’s clothes. She removed her jackknife from the top drawer of her dresser and slipped out of her room and down the stairs, her sneakers in her hand. She bypassed the front door and went straight through the kitchen to the back door. It didn’t creak and was more private, plus Suzanne had hidden a key under a plant pot for when Iris slept in the hammock. Once outside, Iris put on her shoes and went through the side gate and onto the sidewalk, keeping to the shadows as much as she could.

The town slept. Iris knew vaguely where she was from being driven around, but her internal map was incomplete. It didn’t matter. She followed her senses, sniffing the air and judging the height of the trees and the shape of the land from the moon shadows. She moved away from the center of town, through the university—a very large school where Iris had overheard Suzanne tell Brynn she should never go late at night. Iris guessed that whatever dangers Suzanne meant weren’t ones that would bother Iris. She was just passing through and doubted anyone could catch her anyway.