Set Me Free (14 page)

Jim Bugle died alone, but the general feeling in the area was that the old bastard deserved it. He gained much more admiration
in death than in life, because that ostentatious house tempted hopeful rancher after hopeful rancher through the 1960s and
‘70s, each one undone by the sheer difficulty of maintaining a viable ranch on forty-seven acres of scrub and brush and sand.
Rumor had it that the land was cursed, that no one in his right mind could get anything worthwhile off that loveless earth.
The Indians who’d been forced off it sat back, cracked their beers, and had a bitter laugh from the sidelines.

Enter the young, bright-eyed Elliot Barrow. A man with a vision. He waltzed into town in the early days of 1981, and by June
he’d bought the place. Cash down. Rumor had it he was a member of a cult, like the Rajneeshis, who dressed in red and were
taking over the nearby town of Antelope. Then there was the theory that he was a marijuana maven come to make some illicit
bucks off the land. That would explain the beat-up car and the liquid assets. But where had the baby come from? And why did
he keep talking about a school for Neige Courante kids?

Almost sixteen years later, Helen was circling the house, searching for a doorbell. Her clogs, completely inappropriate for
the outdoors—she’d already rolled her ankle twice on the gravel—clacked on the wide floorboards of the porch. She’d figured
out that no one lived on the bottom story; a quick peer in the windows revealed desks, chairs, and chalkboards, a kitchen,
and the semblance of a cafeteria. There didn’t seem to be any way inside. Scratch that; there seemed to be a lot of ways inside,
but all of the doorways were dark, and she didn’t want to spend her evening lost in the cavern of this huge building. (Which
was a good call. Jim Bugle had taken to making pocket-sized architectural maps for all his lost lady loves.)

Helen stepped back from the house and craned her neck to the
top story. The house had seemed lit from within, warm, inviting. But now she saw that had been simply an impression, a desire
to get out of the Native American’s car. She had wanted to feel invited and had made the house inviting. There was in fact
only one light on, and it cast out from the topmost windows, brightening up the vast dusk falling around the house. There
seemed to be no signs of life here, and certainly nothing like a welcoming party.

Helen called Ferdinand to her side. It was nearly dark, and she remembered there were things like coyotes in this part of
the world. She called out: “Hello?” Her voice was much less bold than she would have liked. Her “hello” resounded in her head
six or seven times before she called out again. Nothing. She picked up two rocks from the driveway and tossed one at the house.
It hit the roof of the porch. How on earth was she going to get to the fourth floor? She tried hard to keep down a mounting
sense of rage, which she had a feeling would manifest itself in a round of tears. Why was it that Duncan’s infidelities had
left her dry, but this man, whom she hadn’t seen or really spoken to in nearly two decades, had the power to flood her tear
ducts?

“Can I help you?”

Helen wheeled around to find two teenage girls, one brown and round, one white and lean, arm in arm, emerging from the dusk.
Ferdinand bounded toward them and jumped up on them, slathering them in kisses.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Helen heard herself saying. She made her voice commanding. “Ferdinand. Come.” As he reluctantly made his
way back to her, she said, “He’s just a big teddy bear. I hope he didn’t frighten you.”

“What’s with the rocks?” the round girl asked.

Helen glanced down at her hand, still clutching a large piece of gravel. She said meekly, “I couldn’t figure out how to get
inside.”

The girls exchanged a look. “Urn,” the tall one said, “were you trying to break a window?”

“No! No. I’m just trying to get Elliot’s attention—”

“You need my dad?”

“Amelia? I didn’t recognize you! Sweet girl! You’re beautiful! The last time I saw you, you were in a Snugli on your dad’s
chest!” Helen launched through the three feet between them and grasped Amelia in her arms. The girl was tall and bold and
too skinny. Her long hair was pulled into a ponytail. Her T-shirt was tight on her slim frame. She smelled of the outdoors.
It took Helen a moment before she realized she wasn’t being hugged back. “I’m Helen,” she said, letting go, by way of explanation.
The girls’ expressions didn’t change. “Helen,” she said again. “That fucker didn’t tell you anything, did he?”

At the word “fucker,” the girls burst into giggles. The brown one said, “Jesus, lady, how did you get here?”

“Oh. Carl drove me.”

“Carl?”

“I mean Cal? Oh, dear. I mean Cal. Cal picked me up in Portland.”

“Carl?”

“He was—he was—”

“He was Indian.”

“Yes.”

“I know who Cal is. I just can’t believe he drove all the way to Portland to pick you up.”

“Assistant Headmaster Calbert Fleecing,” Amelia added.

“Assistant headmaster?”

“Yup.” The brown girl stuck out her hand. “Lydia. Also Indian. We’re crawling all over these parts. It’s practically an infestation.”

Helen didn’t know how to respond. She tried to smile.

“Joking!” said Lydia. “So how do you know Elliot?”

“We’re old friends. We’ve known each other a long time.”

“How come Amelia’s never heard of you?” Apparently, the girls were connected by ESP, and Lydia was their spokesperson.

“I’m not sure.” Helen found herself oddly willing to open up. Lydia’s questioning, though inquisitionlike, had an air of informality
about it that kept the conversation breezy. “Actually,” Helen heard herself saying, “we used to be married. Just briefly.”
She saw the alarm in Amelia register on Lydia’s face. “Oh, but long before you were born, Amelia.” Shit. Why on earth had
she volunteered that information?

“So you’re not Astrid, back from the dead?”

“No! No, I’m Helen. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have mentioned the marriage part. I’m sorry. I should just—”

“Don’t apologize, Helen. This is very illuminating. Did you know Amelia’s mother?”

“Urn…” Helen was in deep water here. Better to say something vague. Better to say nothing at all. She nodded her assent.

“And now you’re… what? Reigniting passion’s flame?”

Amelia, who’d been looking at the ground, interrupted: “Where did you come from?”

“New York. Brooklyn?.”

“And Dad knows you’re coming?”

“He bought me the plane ticket?.”

Lydia looked at Amelia and said, as though they were in private, “She’s legit. Should we help her?”

At first Helen thought the “help her” meant in general, as though she were a wounded animal caught in a trap, needing lifeor-death
assistance, or someone lost in a foreign country, desperate for the right combination of words. But when a wordless Amelia
walked to a suitcase and hefted it, then started trudging toward the house, Helen realized what Lydia meant. She meant helping
her with the luggage. She meant helping her inside. They dragged the dog crate onto the porch and took turns in twos, carrying
the suitcases through the many doorways and up the oddly circuitous set of stairs, as Ferdinand waggled and squeezed past
them. They didn’t stop to talk, but when they reached the top-floor apartment, a smiling Lydia offered to make burritos.

The three of them sat around the table, drinking cool water. The girls asked Helen about New York, where they had never
been, and things became positively chatty. No one mentioned Elliot’s name or the fact that he wasn’t there, and Helen didn’t
ask. Likewise, the girls didn’t ask Helen about her marriage to Elliot, or about Amelia’s mother, which was a relief. Still,
Helen felt more than a little ashamed. In retrospect, she knew why she’d mentioned her stint as Mrs. Elliot Barrow: to make
the girls her first set of allies. They wanted her secrets, and now they were going to do a dance around those secrets in
hopes of getting the truth. It was a cheap trick, but it had felt to her, in that moment, in the near dark, locked outside
Elliot’s house, that it was her only ticket inside.

Once upon a time, there was a skinny woman who was skinny in all the wrong ways. She had believed this all her life, that
she was skinny in all the wrong ways. But she didn’t know she believed this until the day she found her husband in bed with
a different woman. The husband didn’t notice the skinny woman opening the door to her own bedroom. But the different woman
saw the skinny woman the second she opened that door. The different woman made a sound like a cooing, like a gasp, and the
skinny woman closed the door again, quickly, and wondered in a split second whether the cooing sound was a sound of surprise
or a sound of lovemaking, and then the skinny woman thought, “Well, perhaps those are one and the same. “

The husband didn’t try to make the skinny woman stay. He didn’t do much. He shrugged his gently muscled shoulders and ran
his fingers through his perfect soft hair. He didn’t know what it was to be too skinny, too smart, too desperate. He was always
only just those things, and being only just those things made him perfect and different: slim, and brilliant, and hungry.
He didn’t know what it was to be on the dark side of the moon. Now the skinny woman saw how inevitable this moment was
—
her leaving, his not asking her to stay.

The skinny woman and the husband shared a home with many other people. They were like a village, these people, or a clan.
The clan cooked together. The clan ate together. The clan made decisions together. Up until this point, the skinny woman thought
the clan didn’t sleep together. But apparently, she was wrong about that. Naive. In the husband’s world, this description
would have been changed to “innocent. “

The skinny woman came to hate everyone in the clan. She turned against the family she had made, the family who had promised
her so much. This was not what she had expected. Now that she was packing her bags and telling the husband to leave her alone,
please, the skinny woman realized she didn’t want any of it. She saw now, as she was being shot out the end of the cannon
of love, that all the time she’d been in her husband’s arms, she had been in a darkness where his close voice was the solitary
truth she believed. She saw that he had this power over the whole clan, that they loved him, that they listened to him, that
they would do anything for him. The skinny woman saw how dangerous this was. She felt relief She didn’t have to stay in the
clan anymore. Perhaps she had been wrong. Perhaps life by committee was a fate worse than loneliness.

That night the skinny woman undressed in front of the mirror in her mother’s home. She intended to give herself a good hard
look. She intended to see, once and for all, just where she was too skinny, and to make a decision about what could be done
to help it. What could be done to help her: her skinniness, her smartness, her desperation. But she kept being distracted
by the absence of her mother. Her mother didn’t live in her own home anymore, and the quiet was unsettling. The skinny woman
examined herself and felt ashamed. She had been ignoring a job for months now, which she had told her mother she’d already
done, and that job was packing up her mother’s home and dividing her mother’s possessions and passing her mother’s home on
to someone else if the skinny woman didn’t want it herself. The skinny woman’s mother was not dead yet. But she lived as if
dead, in a place with other old people. That had been the mother’s choice. As with most other matters, the skinny woman hadn’t
known how to stop her mother from making this mistake.

When the skinny woman looked at her nakedness, all she saw was regret. Regret and dismay. She remembered the sound the different
woman had made when the door opened. She remembered how the different woman’s hip looked under a flash of covers
—
round and stipple
—
even though she was probably no bigger than the skinny woman and weighed no more. The skinny woman wondered how that could
be. The skinny woman remembered how the different woman had shimmered and glowed,
how she had seemed to have wings of some kind, so big was her smile in the midst of her lovemaking. She was like a soaring
bird in a blue sky and the skinny woman was like a small stone at the bottom of a dirty puddle. The skinny woman realized
she couldn’t really blame the husband for liking the bird over the pebble. And then the skinny woman decided now that she’d
realized this, she was finally allowed to buy a dog.

The skinny woman grew up in the city. Her mother never let her have a dog. It wasn’t practical. Her husband, the clan, no
one would let the skinny woman live with an animal. But the next morning she put on her clothes and she went to the place
where they killed dogs if they weren’t rescued and she chose a dog that was wild and woolly and sweet and old and she brought
it home to her mother’s house and she lived with it there and made herself a new life.

She tried not to think about the different woman, whom she thought of as a bird. She tried not to think about the husband.
She found success. She met new people. These people adored her, and she was no longer afraid that living in her mother’s home,
alone, the way her mother had, would make her sad in the way her mother was. Lots of things changed that fear, but she believed
especially hard that it was the dog that had turned things around.

Meanwhile, the husband’s life went somewhere unexpected. Somewhere terrible. Somewhere so terrible, that in the midst of it,
the skinny woman was to be the only one on whom the husband believed he could call for help. Tell me how that is fair. But
there it is. By the time the husband asked the skinny woman for help, she was not so worried about being skinny. In fact,
she hardly noticed it about herself anymore. Her dog had died, but she knew how to survive it. She had a new dog. She would
get a new dog when that one died, and she would tend to it until its life ended too. She had a future. She was no longer afraid.
She was strong enough to help the husband when he needed her most.